New ACI Specification Aims to Help AI Agents Understand Organizations Reliably

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A new open specification called the Autonomous Company Interface (ACI) has been introduced to address a critical gap in how AI agents interact with organizations online. Currently, autonomous agents can call APIs and query databases but cannot reliably determine what a company is, what it offers, or how much it should be trusted without scraping or custom integration. ACI proposes a machine-readable format consisting of five linked JSON manifest types covering identity, capability, knowledge, trust, and agent interaction details. Organizations would publish these manifests via a discoverable entry point, allowing agents to systematically retrieve structured organizational context before engaging with any APIs. The specification is positioned as a complement to existing standards like OpenAPI, which describes interfaces but not the organizations behind them.

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