Capabilities & Contracts

In AIX AEP, an AI agent’s capability is governed through formal, machine-readable contracts between the Capability Provider and the Consuming Application.

The Dual-Contract Architecture


┌──────────────────────────┐          ┌──────────────────────────┐
│    Provider Contract     │          │   Consumption Contract   │
├──────────────────────────┤          ├──────────────────────────┤
│ • Authority identity     │          │ • Permitted tenant scope │
│ • Tool invocation schema │  ──────> │ • Side-effect boundaries │
│ • Service token issuer   │          │ • Read-only vs Read-Write│
│ • SLA & max staleness    │          │ • Expiration / TTL       │
└──────────────────────────┘          └──────────────────────────┘

Consumption Contract Attributes

When exploring the Catalog in /aep/catalog, each capability exposes:

Attribute	Meaning	Allowed Values
`readiness`	Capability deployment status	`ready`, `updating`, `deprecated`
`classification`	Enterprise data sensitivity tier	`public`, `internal`, `confidential`, `restricted`
`side_effect`	Mutating impact on external systems	`none`, `read`, `scoped_write`, `destructive`
`route_class`	Network isolation topology	`internal`, `egress_proxy`, `vpc_peering`
`provider_sync`	Timestamp of last authoritative sync	UTC ISO8601 string

Capability Grant Lifecycle

Catalog Registration: Capability provider publishes manifest signed by CI/CD cosign key.
Entitlement Request: Consumer project owner submits a request with duration and justification.
Grant Issuance: Upon approval, AEP issues an immutable scoped grant projected into Kubernetes Secrets or GSM.