Axiom
The governed agent platform for high-consequence operations.
Most agent platforms optimize for what an agent can do. Axiom is built for teams who also have to answer for what it did: research labs, industrial sites, classrooms, and — increasingly — fleets of physical systems, where automation has to be provable, bounded, and reversible.
Why Axiom
Where the field converged on chat loops with tools, Axiom treats accountability as the platform primitive:
- Every action runs under a capability-scoped token. Scheduled or interactive, an agent acts inside an envelope issued by the vault — never on a bare long-lived API key.
- Every receipt is queryable memory. Fires, notifications, replies, and edits land as provenance-stamped memory fragments. "Show every scheduled action that touched classified data last quarter" is one query, not log archaeology.
- Humans reply where they already are — and it binds back. Deliveries go out over the channels people actually use, and a reply threads back into the originating agent's memory context under the same provenance tuple.
- Graduated autonomy, enforced. Trust profiles, durable approval gates,
and identity that reaches every
decide()call: the agent asks before it matters, and the record shows that it asked. - Federation across organizational boundaries. Sovereign nodes, classification-aware projection, and accountable humans propagated across cohort handoffs. Peers — not shared databases.
One core, many surfaces
Axiom is a core runtime — gateway, memory, agent fleet, policy, data platform — with surfaces as members of one extension family. The CLI and chat surfaces ship today; a web application kit builds on the same primitives; further surfaces (mobile, voice) follow the same pattern. A product built on Axiom inherits its UI the way it inherits its governance — from the platform, not from scratch.
Underneath, Axiom stays domain-agnostic: each product brings its own knowledge, agents, and tools as extensions; Axiom provides everything beneath them — LLM routing, RAG, memory, federation, and a self-discovering CLI. A domain consumer sits on top as the first layer.
Install (60 seconds)
pip install axiom-os-lm
axi config # onboarding wizard: provisions a local llamafile + model
axi status # platform health
axi chat # interactive agent
axi config provisions a single-binary llamafile and a local weights file in ~/.axi/llamafile/ so the platform runs without a cloud key. Run axi config --model <name> to choose a different bundled model; the LLM Gateway routes to self-hosted, private-network, or cloud providers per request tier.
Architecture
Harnesses and users reach the platform through one gateway; the agent fleet reasons over memory and RAG; Vega governs federation, identity, and the trust graph; the data platform carries the medallion tiers; everything persists to a single Postgres, one schema per extension (ADR-052).
Nodes join the federation independently at any tier — a laptop, a private GPU server behind a VPN, or an HPC cluster for isolated workloads. A domain product (a consumer layer) sits on top, extending the platform through AEOS extensions.
What Axiom Provides
| Capability | What it is |
|---|---|
| LLM Gateway | Multi-provider routing with tier classification, private-network checks, circuit breakers, and audit logging |
| RAG | Three-tier corpus (community / organization / personal), pgvector embeddings, hybrid vector + full-text search, grounding hooks |
| Composition Memory | MemoryFragment with immutable (T,U,A,R) provenance and the MIRIX 6-type taxonomy, behind a single CompositionService (ADR-026/027) |
| Agent Fleet | 15 builtin agents coordinating read → reason → act → publish (see below) |
| Federation (Vega) | Ed25519 node identity, peer discovery, trust graph, .axiompack portable knowledge bundles, A2A agent cards |
| Connectors | Uniform inbound/outbound connectors for Slack, Teams, Email, and Microsoft 365, with a common descriptor for adding more (ADR-068) |
| Data Platform | Medallion ingest + storage via the data_platform extension: Bronze sinks, a pgvector vector store, and a source registry (Box and more); heavier lakehouse query tiers (DuckDB / Iceberg) install via the optional [data-platform] extra |
| Scheduling & Secrets | App-level scheduler with cadences (PULSE) and a pluggable secret/vault backend (KEEP / OpenBao) |
| Extensions (AEOS) | Every capability is an extension conforming to the Agent Extension Open Standard; the CLI, MCP catalog, and agents discover them from manifests |
| CLI | 50+ purpose-named nouns with availability-aware dispatch (ADR-047) — verbs whose backing service is unreachable are hidden, not broken |
Key Concepts
A request is a chat turn
A turn enters from the CLI (axi chat) or an MCP client, an agent reads (recalls memory and retrieves grounding), reasons (the LLM Gateway classifies the request and routes it to the right tier), acts (skills and tools; any op that mutates external state passes the action guard), and publishes (appends an immutable memory fragment and delivers through HERALD). Content classified as controlled stays on a private-network model and never leaves to a cloud provider; eligibility gating applies at the same seam.
One database, one schema per extension
Extensions never construct an engine or see a DSN. They call session_for("<ext>"); the DatabaseProvider hands back a Session scoped to the extension's own Postgres schema (search_path = "<ext>, public"). One Postgres per install, schema-per-extension isolation, a guided within-extension tenancy menu (single-tenant / row-level tenant_id / schema-per-tenant), and cross-extension reads that ride the data platform rather than OLTP joins — all per ADR-052.
The Agent Fleet
Agents are LLM personas with deterministic guardrails; the CLI nouns are their purpose-named "arms and legs" (ADR-056 — axi hygiene, not axi tidy). Fifteen builtin agents ship with the platform, grouped by lane:
| Agent | Lane | Focus | Primary CLI surface |
|---|---|---|---|
| AXI | Interaction | Interactive assistant + work routing | axi chat |
| SCAN | Knowledge | Signal ingestion & extraction (events → structured signals) | axi signal |
| CURIO | Knowledge | Auto-research & corpus evaluation — quality gating, confidence learning, knowledge-pack lifecycle | agent; gates the RAG corpus |
| PRESS | Knowledge | Document lifecycle (draft → standards → publish) | axi publish |
| TIDY | Reliability & Review | Workspace, repo & doc-standards hygiene, service health, CI watch (steward) | axi hygiene |
| TRIAGE | Reliability & Review | AI-assisted diagnostics & self-healing | axi doctor, axi triage |
| RIVET | Reliability & Review | Release lifecycle & CI/heartbeat monitoring | axi release |
| REV-U | Reliability & Review | Multi-pass diff review | axi review |
| GUARD | Governance & Security | Authorization & policy decisions (the sole decision point) | axi audit |
| KEEP | Governance & Security | Capability-token lifecycle + credential chaining | axi vault |
| HERALD | Platform services | Outbound multi-channel notifications | axi notifications |
| PULSE | Platform services | Scheduling & cadences | axi schedule, axi calendar |
| PLINTH | Data platform | Medallion data platform (Bronze/Silver/Gold) | axi data |
| CHALKE | Classroom (Keplo) | Classroom orchestration & instructor brief | axi classroom |
| WARDEN | Vega (Federation) | Federation trust boundary — peer-state transitions, signature verification, classification policy, trust-graph queries | axi federation, axi nodes |
WARDEN is Vega's federation-governance agent (Verifier · Enforcer · Gatekeeper · Arbiter); its verdicts are deterministic and auditable. The federated research and knowledge-observatory surfaces (axi research, axi knowledge, axi security) live on the same federation extension.
Extensions (AEOS)
Everything non-core is an extension conforming to the Agent Extension Open Standard. The CLI, MCP catalog, and agents discover commands, skills, tools, and agents from an axiom-extension.toml manifest:
[extension]
name = "my-extension"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "What it does"
license = "Apache-2.0"
[[extension.provides]]
kind = "cmd" # one of eight kinds: agent · tool · cmd · service · adapter · skill · hook · prompt
noun = "myext"
entry = "my_extension.cli:main"
description = "My custom commands"
AEOS defines exactly eight capability kinds — agent, tool, cmd, service, adapter, skill, hook, prompt. CLI verbs are thin wrappers over skill functions ((params, ctx) -> SkillResult, ADR-056), so the same capability is callable from the CLI, from a peer agent over A2A, and from an external harness over MCP. Discovery tiers: builtin (src/axiom/extensions/builtins/) → installed PyPI packages → user (~/.axi/extensions/), with later tiers shadowing earlier ones for the same noun. Scaffold one with axi ext init <name>; check conformance with axi ext lint.
Where Things Live
axiom/
src/axiom/
memory/ # MemoryFragment, CompositionService, ownership, policy
vega/ # Vega (federation + identity), pre-extraction staging per ADR-031
federation/ # cohort registry, A2A, trust graph, classification; hosts WARDEN
identity/ # keypair, signatures, principals
extensions/builtins/ # the domain-agnostic builtin extensions (one dir per extension)
infra/ # gateway, orchestrator, prompt registry, DatabaseProvider (session_for)
rag/ # retrieval store, hybrid search
policy/ # scope policy engine + agent-action guard
docs/ # map: docs/README.md · standard: docs/conventions/doc-standards.md
adrs/ # Architecture Decision Records (the WHY)
prds/ # Product Requirement Documents (the WHAT)
specs/ # Technical specifications (the HOW)
conventions/ # portfolio standards (doc-standards, the-axiomatic-way)
templates/ # skeletons for new PRDs / specs / ADRs
papers/ working/ # published research; drafts, audits, design notes
assets/diagrams/ # rendered PNG diagrams authored in Mermaid
packages/ # sibling distributions (axiom-tests, design tokens, data-platform ext)
runtime/ # instance-specific data (gitignored)
tests/ # cross-cutting tests (extension tests live alongside their code)
vega/ is the federation and identity layer — the substrate WARDEN governs — staged inside the repo ahead of its extraction to a standalone product (ADR-031 Phase 3).
Domain Products
Axiom is domain-agnostic. Domain products add the knowledge, agents, and tools for their field:
| Product | Domain |
|---|---|
| (a domain consumer) | A scientific facility (experiment + processing lifecycle, digital twin) |
| (your product) | Any domain |
Development
git clone https://github.com/b-tree-labs/axiom-os.git
cd axiom-os
pip install -e ".[all]"
pytest # tests (TDD is the house rule)
ruff check src/ tests/ # lint
python -m build # wheel + sdist
See AGENTS.md for architecture, conventions, and the load-bearing ADRs.
Documentation
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| AGENTS.md | Architecture, conventions, ADR index (the canonical context file; per-harness files are kept in sync from it) |
| Docs map | One folder per document kind — where everything lives |
| Doc standards | The portfolio-wide documentation standard (audited by axi hygiene stat docs) |
| Spec index | Every current spec, grouped by area (start at the memory stack) |
| AEOS spec | Agent Extension Open Standard |
| CLI spec | Full command reference |
| Federation spec | Multi-node protocol |
| RAG architecture | Knowledge retrieval design |
| Agent architecture | Agent capabilities |
Contributing
Contributions are welcome — code, extensions, docs, and good bug reports.
- CONTRIBUTING.md — setup, the house rules (TDD, AEOS, domain-agnostic core), the AI-assisted-contributions policy, and the DCO.
- GOVERNANCE.md — how decisions get made and what we optimize for.
- SUPPORT.md — where to ask questions (best-effort, volunteer-run).
- SECURITY.md — report vulnerabilities privately; supply-chain posture and coordinated disclosure.
- Code of Conduct — be excellent to each other.
License
Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.
Acknowledgments
Developed at an academic institution and released as open source under Apache-2.0 with the institution's technology-transfer approval.
Copyright (c) 2026 The University of Texas at Austin and B-Tree Labs. Apache-2.0 licensed.
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
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