A grade for every agent, from AAA to D.
Before your agents work with someone else's, you need to know how far to trust it. An Agent Rating answers in one grade. It is worked out from signed evidence about that exact version of the agent, by a published method, so anyone can work it out again and nobody can buy a better one.
Nobody can read sixty checks before every call.
An agent can be checked in sixty ways, across eleven areas: who answers for it, what it may do and spend, what it can reach, how it was made, how it behaves, when a person decides, what it has done, whether it is working, who can stop it, and how it changes. Each check is a signed fact, recorded in an attestation.
That detail is what an auditor needs. A buyer, a security team or another agent needs the answer first. Credit markets solved the same problem long ago: audited accounts are the evidence, and a rating like AAA is the summary everyone understands. Agent Rating borrows that scale for agents.
The scale
Grades run from AAA, the strongest assurance, to D, where something that matters has failed. The top four are investment grade.
| Grade | What has to be true |
|---|---|
| AAA | Every area passed, and an independent party attested each one. The evidence of its conduct covers at least 90 days, with no incident in that time. |
| AA | Every area passed, each attested by someone other than its operator. The evidence of its conduct covers at least 60 days. |
| A | Every area passed. The five core areas were attested independently. The evidence of its conduct covers at least 30 days. |
| BBB | The five core areas passed, each attested by someone other than its operator, and no check failed anywhere. |
| BB | The five core areas passed, but at least one rests only on its operator's word, or a check outside the core failed. |
| B | Identity and Stopping passed. The rest of the core is not attested. |
| CCC | It has a current attestation, but Identity or Stopping is not attested. |
| D | A check in a core area failed, an incident is open, or the agent has been stopped. |
| NR | Not rated: no current attestation covers this version. |
The five core areas are the ones another organization relies on first: Identity (who it is and who answers for it), Authority (what it may do, and for whom), Reach (what it can touch), Provenance (how it was made) and Stopping (who can halt it). The full rules, in the order they are applied, are in how a rating is worked out.
BBB is the line that matters.
In credit, many funds may only hold investment grade. Agents get the same line. A company can write one rule that everyone understands: agents from other organizations must be rated BBB or better to reach ours. A network checks the rule before it delivers a message, a catalog filters by it, and a procurement team writes it into a contract.
A grade can be put on watch.
A rating describes one version at one time, so it says when it may be about to change. It shows on watch beside the grade when:
- a new version is running and no attestation covers it yet. After 14 days without one, the rating becomes NR;
- an attestation the grade rests on expires within 14 days;
- an incident is under review.
When an attestation is withdrawn or expires, the grade is worked out again from what remains. A grade can fall overnight, which is the point.
It rests on attestations, and nothing else.
Every grade is worked out from current attestations of that version of the agent, held to the published list of checks at commonagent.net. Three things about each attestation feed the grade:
- The results: which areas passed, failed or were not attested.
- Who signed: the agent's own operator, a provider whose product produced the evidence, or an independent party that neither built it, runs it, nor produced the evidence.
- The period: how long the evidence of its conduct covers.
Because the method is published and the attestations are signed, the same attestations always give the same grade. A rating names the version of the method it used and the attestations it rests on, so anyone can work it out again. Nobody issues ratings and nobody sells them, so an agent's operator cannot pay for a better one.
Where a rating shows
- Areas passed
- 11 of 11
- Signed by
- 2 independent parties, 1 provider
- Conduct covered
- Oct 3 to Nov 2, 2026
- Method
- 0.1, worked out Nov 4, 2026
A rating appears as a badge in an agent's README and on its catalog listing, and in its AgentDoc, where every grade opens onto the area-by-area results and the attestations behind them. The grade is the headline. The detail is always one click away.