AgentHook™ is the specification for the lifecycle hooks every AI agent runtime should expose, so operators, auditors, and regulators can record what an agent did, when, why, and with what reasoning.
Apache-2.0 in perpetuity. Stewarded by Agentic Thinking Limited under a binding charter with a no-relicence pledge, an irrevocable patent grant, and a written stewardship-transfer trigger to a neutral foundation.
EU AI Act Article 12 requires automatic event logging for high-risk AI systems. Every enterprise deploying agentic AI in regulated jurisdictions needs auditable, transcript-grade records of every action an agent takes. Agent runtimes today expose hooks inconsistently. Coverage varies between vendors and over time. There is no shared definition of what a complete hook surface looks like, what events must be emitted, or what metadata each event must carry.
Today, compliance tools have to be rebuilt per agent provider because each runtime exposes a different hook surface. With AgentHook, every conforming runtime emits the same envelope, and a single audit, policy, or memory subscriber connects to all of them.
Each compliance tool has to know each runtime's hook surface, fail-mode behaviour, and metadata shape. Every new vendor adds another integration. Every change to a vendor's hooks breaks the audit trail.
Runtimes emit a standard envelope. Compliance tools subscribe once and work across every conforming runtime. Vendor changes are absorbed by the envelope contract, not by every downstream subscriber.
AgentHook defines the wire-format envelope every event must carry, the canonical set of event types every conforming runtime emits, the standard metadata keys per event type, and the hook delivery semantics (sync versus async, fail-mode behaviour). It is implementation-neutral: any transport, any host language, provided the envelope and semantics are honoured.
Implementations may emit additional event types using PascalCase names. Subscribers may ignore unknown types. Buses must not reject events on unrecognised event_type.
A publisher claims a tier. A test rig verifies the claim. The self-test harness is open source and free for any implementer. A hosted Conformance-as-a-Service is operated by the steward for procurement-grade signed reports, on a cost-recovery basis. Conformance certification is never used to gate participation in the working group or in the specification.
Publisher emits the canonical event types with the envelope format. Required fields populated, valid JSON, valid event_id, valid timestamp.
Bronze plus matched Pre and Post LLM call pairs carrying model, provider, token counts, and response content.
Silver plus reasoning content capture when the provider exposes it, and correlation IDs on Pre events that initiate sub-agent calls or retries.
The specification is published and stewarded by Agentic Thinking Limited (UK), a private company limited by shares (company number 17152930). Stewardship is provisional. The intent is to transfer to a neutral foundation when adoption justifies the legal and operational cost. The following commitments are binding on the steward and any successor.
The licence shall not be replaced, restricted, or supplemented with additional terms by the steward or any successor.
No fee may be charged for the right to implement the specification, claim conformance, or use the AgentHook name in describing an implementation.
Any individual or organisation may submit Proposals and contribute to working-group discussion. Vote-eligible seats are limited to founding and elected members; this does not restrict contribution.
Royalty-free, irrevocable patent licence to any party implementing the specification. Survives any change of stewardship.
The specification may be forked at any time under Apache 2.0. The steward may not assert trademark rights against forks (provided the forks do not represent themselves as the official specification).
Any amendment to the Charter or to these commitments requires twelve months' public notice and unanimous Working Group approval.
Working group composition is being finalised ahead of the public draft. Any individual or organisation may contribute to discussion in GitHub Issues. Substantive specification changes follow the AgentHook Proposal (AHP) process.
Envelope format, ten canonical event types, hook delivery semantics, conformance tiers.
Substantive changes go through the AHP process, modelled on Python PEPs and Rust RFCs.
Questions, edge cases, integration notes, conformance test feedback. All on GitHub.
The provisional steward of the AgentHook specification. Builders of HookBus, the first reference implementation.