Google Cloud's Open Knowledge Format Offers Structured Alternative to RAG for AI Agents

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Google Cloud engineers Sam McVeety and Amir Hormati published the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) on June 12, 2026, as a structured way for AI agents to access curated knowledge. OKF organizes information as a directory of markdown files, where each file represents a single concept such as a metric, table, or policy, and files link to one another forming a navigable knowledge graph. The format was inspired by a pattern described by Andrej Karpathy in April 2026, which proposed that agents maintain and update a living wiki rather than repeatedly retrieving raw documents via vector search. Unlike retrieval-augmented generation, which chunks documents and risks severing important contextual links, OKF preserves relationships between related concepts by design. The format is tool-agnostic and requires no vector database, working with any system that can read plain files, including Google Cloud's Knowledge Catalog, GitHub, or standard file directories.

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