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Agent Protocol Stack

Abhyasa

Abhyasa (Sanskrit for sustained practice) defines a transport-agnostic framework that delivers governance obligations under a deliver-or-report guarantee.

The Gap

Section titled “The Gap”

Agent transports deliver messages reliably. None of them addresses whether a governance obligation a message carries — a consent decision, a corrective welfare signal — survives a channel that is lossy, intermittent, or partitioned. Over such a channel a best-effort governance message can be silently dropped, leaving an agent acting without authorization or correction, with no party aware the signal was lost. Transport reliability is necessary but not sufficient for governance correctness.

The Approach

Section titled “The Approach”

Guaranteed delivery is impossible over an unreliable channel (the Two Generals Problem; FLP), and by the end-to-end argument the missing guarantee belongs at the endpoints, not in an intermediary queue. A governance obligation whose loss carries asymmetric cost can declare a fail-safe polarity: a pure safe(O) default the sender applies locally when delivery is not confirmed. Abhyasa lifts the custody-transfer mechanism of delay-tolerant networking from opaque bundles to governance obligations, pairs at-least-once delivery with idempotent application (effectively-once), and adds a principal-side fail-safe that holds without a working reverse channel.

Four Invariants

Section titled “Four Invariants”
InvariantBehaviour
AB-1 CustodyRetain responsibility until an applied/declined ack or the deadline.
AB-2 PersistenceOn timeout, retry under bounded exponential backoff up to max_retries.
AB-3 IdempotencyReceiver applies at most once, keyed on obligation_id, persisted with the effect.
AB-4 Fail-safeOn deadline without applied/declined, run safe(O) on principal-side state and escalate.

Deliver-or-report: every admissible obligation terminates as applied, declined, or escalated — never silent loss.

Admissibility (AC-1)

Section titled “Admissibility (AC-1)”

An obligation is Abhyasa-admissible only if it declares a fail-safe polarity. The framework is invariant-agnostic; instantiations supply the polarity rule:

InstantiationPolaritysafe(O)
Anumati (consent)binarywithhold principal-mediated authority (fail-closed)
Phala, corrective (valence < 0)signeddown-weight principal-side routing to the target
OAuth, token revocationbinaryauthorization server stops honoring the token (fail-closed)

Reinforcing Phala updates and OAuth issue/refresh are benign-loss and travel best-effort, not under custody.

Section titled “Links”