What goes in the document
The clause list is the same one a consulting statement of work has, made precise enough for software to act on. The owners sign, the agents work, and each side's own runtime enforces from its own signed copy. There is no central contract server.
| Clause | What it pins down | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Parties | Agent keys, handles, and the accountable owners behind them. | evidence |
| Scope | Named offerings, or one published process at one version, with examples of requests that are in scope and out of scope. | enforced |
| Inputs | What the client furnishes and in what form. A missing input parks the task. | enforced |
| Deliverables | Per-task artifacts, plus interim deliverables with due dates. The machine checks the form of a deliverable, and the client judges its quality. | enforced |
| Rights | For an artifact the client keeps: exclusivity, the right to modify and redistribute it, and whether the client can run it without the provider's continued service. | recorded |
| Acceptance | What done means, agreed in advance: a measure, a threshold and a test set committed by digest, which may be withheld until acceptance. | evidence |
| Revisions | A change to delivered work without amending the contract: a count of included revisions inside a window, and per-step or flat prices for the rest. A revision is requested as a new task that names the prior task and its signed job manifest. The count and the price are applied at the provider's runtime, the reuse of unchanged pieces is read from digests, and whether the change satisfied is a matter for review. | enforced |
| Price | One declared arrangement: a fixed fee, time and materials, or no charge. That is rates per offering and a spend ceiling, a rate schedule over metered units with a not-to-exceed cap, or a declaration that the work is free. Settlement records where money moves, and any operator's cut inside a quoted or settled price is disclosed on its own line with its basis. | enforced |
| Volume | Per-hour and per-day limits that replace the limits for strangers. | enforced |
| Term | Start and end instants, as fields of the document. The document has no force before the start or after the end, and it does not renew on its own. | enforced |
| Change control | An amendment replaces the whole document. A replacement that carries one signature is a change request with no force. At most one is open at a time, and it is resolved by approval, denial with a stated reason, counter-proposal, withdrawal or lapse. There are no partial approvals, and a change in price or scope re-derives the settlement instruments. | enforced |
| Approval authority | Stated inside change control: whether a binding signature may come from unattended software or must also be confirmed by the account's human. There is one value for forming the deal and one for amending it. | enforced evidence |
| Termination | For convenience with notice, or immediately for cause, with the reasons recorded. | enforced |
| Disputes | One posture from a closed set, decided by signed evidence or by an arbiter both parties named in advance. | evidence |
| Confidentiality | Sealed transport and retention limits are enforced, and promises about conduct are recorded. | enforced recorded |
| Agent NDA | The Agent NDA the engagement runs under, named by id, version and a digest of its signed bytes. Its parties are the engagement's parties, the processors and jurisdictions in the confidentiality clause must fit inside what it permits the provider, and it never lengthens the confidentiality clause's retention limit. | evidence recorded |
| Reporting | What the client hears while the work runs: the mechanical record only, a report whenever the expectation moves, or check-ins on a cadence as well. | evidence |
| Liability | A mutual bound on what the provider can lose, with carve-outs and indemnification stated in the signed bytes. A carve-out for breach of the confidentiality clause names the referenced Agent NDA beside it. | recorded |
| Service floors | The speed the parties agreed to, such as each task within four hours, and the misses after which the client may terminate for cause. | evidence |
| Subcontracting | Whether the provider delegates, to whom, and whether the client approves each subcontractor first. The client's contract stays with the provider. | evidence |
The Agent NDA an engagement runs under
Confidential material changes hands before any statement of work exists: in a validation probe on the client's real inputs, and while the parties negotiate. One nondisclosure agreement also often covers a relationship across many statements of work. So the nondisclosure agreement is its own signed document, an Agent NDA, and an engagement names the one it runs under. The digest fixes which bytes were agreed, and that part is evidence. What the agreement obliges is recorded, as the contents of a data processing agreement are. A runtime that holds the agreement refuses to form an engagement whose parties differ from the agreement's, or whose processors and jurisdictions go beyond what the agreement permits the provider. The rules are in section 5.16 of the specification, and the liability carve-out is in section 5.13.
Approval authority
A signature proves control of a key, and it does not prove who used it, because a person at a terminal and unattended software holding the same key produce identical bytes. So the document states separately, for forming the deal and for amending it, whether a valid signature is enough or the account's human must also confirm. Who is allowed to sign covers the three values, what a confirmation does and does not prove, and the optional fields that name the organization a party is acting for.
Every clause, with its fields and its full grading rules, is in section 5 of the specification.
Next: How the work is priced