capsule-emit

New here? → docs/start-here.md — the one-page front door.

Vocabulary: TRANSLATION.md — the dev / auditor / spec decoder.

Know what your AI agent did — and let anyone verify it.

capsule-emit records your agent's actions as verifiable capsules; seal() is the one call you make.

One seal() call at each consequential action builds a witnessed, verifiable ledger of what your agent did — each entry sealed (content-addressed by hash) and checkable by anyone, without trusting you.

from capsule_emit import seal

result = {"po_id": "PO-7781"}            # whatever your action returned

capsule = seal(
    {"vendor": "Frobozz Supply", "total": "1240.19"},   # payload: any JSON-serializable value (quantities are strings, not floats)
    action="write_order",
    operator="acme-co",                  # the accountable tenant
    developer="po-agent@v1",             # the agent identity + version
    agent_output=result,
    model={"provider": "anthropic", "model_id": "claude-sonnet-4-6"},
    verdict="executed",                  # executed | confirmed | denied | blocked
    effect={"type": "write_order", "status": "dispatched"},
)
print(capsule.capsule_id, capsule.signature)   # sealed, signed, witnessed by default; anchor is a legacy opt-in (seal(payload, anchor=True))

pip install capsule-emit

capsule-emit is the producer layer for the Agent Action Capsule — a SCITT statement profile. You add one line at the moment your agent does something consequential; you get back a digest-committed, content-addressed capsule — witnessed by a public log — that a third party who trusts neither you nor your agent can independently verify.

Why you need this

Agents now move money, change records, and act across organizational boundaries. When something goes wrong — or someone asks "did your agent really do that, and was it authorized?" — what's your proof?

Your logs are your own word. They're mutable, they live in your database, and they mean nothing to an auditor, a counterparty, or a regulator who has no reason to trust your systems. There's no way for an outside party to confirm a log wasn't edited after the fact.

A capsule is different: its content is committed to a hash the moment the action happens, and that hash is recorded in a public append-only log.* Anyone can verify it offline, from the bytes alone — without trusting you.

* "Public log" ≠ public data. Only a one-way fingerprint (a SHA-256 digest) and a timestamp are logged — your prompts, payloads, vendors, and amounts never leave your machine. What's on the log, and what isn't →

Why your existing stack can't do this

These layers answer different questions — a capsule fills the gap of what an agent provably did:

A capsule records the action and its outcome, with a confirmed-effect binding so a dispatched attempt can't be passed off as a completed effect (the may/did distinction: approved ≠ executed ≠ confirmed). It records on every verdict, including refusals — a blocked capsule is auditor-grade evidence that a gate worked.

Where you start, and where it goes

Start here. Call seal() at each consequential action. You get a witnessed, verifiable ledger of what your agent did — each capsule appended locally to ledger.jsonl, its digest written to a public log. That's the whole starting point. Everything below is optional depth you grow into — no rewrite.

The verb surface. One authorship axis, one thing they all return (a Capsule, appended to the log) — which one you call just says who authored the content:

seal(received(bytes, type="machine-mandate")) and received(bytes, type="machine-mandate") produce the identical capsule — nest a carry inside seal(), or call it standalone; seal() never re-signs an already-carried capsule, and never accepts raw bytes directly (that ambiguity — yours or theirs? — is always refused, not guessed). Composition is nesting the slot verbs who/can/did/audit inside seal(); there is no separate compose()/carry() call.

Then climb, one rung at a time:

• Capture more, write less — a decorator adapter (MCP / LangChain / CrewAI / Hermes / Goose / ADK) seals each wrapped tool call automatically; the agentgateway adapter seals all consequential traffic at the gateway chokepoint — no per-tool changes needed.
• Link records into trails — chain a confirmation capsule to its parent: approved → executed → confirmed, human-in-the-loop, and disclosure all ride this. This is where may/did becomes a verifiable sequence. → seal(payload, confirms=parent_id) · within one stream, and across (under revision)
• Declare now, enforce later — a manifest.md declares your rules; a compatible gateway enforces the same file, with no change to your seal() calls.

The unit is the capsule (one action). What you keep and grow is the ledger (the witnessed trail). Chaining links specific capsules within it. Start with the ledger; add the rest when you need it. → walk it end-to-end in the tutorials.

What you get back

seal() returns an EmitResult — cap.capsule_id, cap.anchored, cap.signature, cap.key_id, cap.seq, and cap.capsule (the capsule itself, plain JSON you can store or hand to anyone). It carries the capsule_id (a SHA-256 content address), a self-attested signature over that content by a persisted producer key (verify it straight from the capsule via verify_capsule_signature — see capsule_emit.signing), the accountable operator + developer, the may/did verdict, the effect (and its dispatched-vs-confirmed status), and digests of your input and output — your inputs and outputs are committed by hash; you hold the raw values, the capsule does not (only their digests). cap.seq is its position in your log — already a leaf, ambiently, before any checkpoint — and both repr(cap) and capsule-emit ledger show render it as #logged @ leaf <seq>.

→ Field-by-field, the two-tier structure, and how each layer is captured: docs/anatomy.md.

Anchoring — where the proof lives

Anchor is a legacy, non-default channel as of 0.5.0. The checkpoint/witness stream below is the only default egress path; this per-capsule anchor exists only as an explicit opt-in (anchor=True or CAPSULE_ANCHOR=legacy-on), kept for one release as a rollback path. When engaged, the capsule's digest only is submitted — async, non-blocking — to an RFC 9162 SCITT transparency log, so this exact capsule's existence is recorded at that time and checkable against the log by a party who trusts neither you nor your runtime. (cap.anchored reports the submission; surfacing the log's inclusion receipt back onto the result is on the near-term roadmap — today the digest is on the log and checkable there.) That's self-attested, not yet witnessed — a single per-capsule inclusion receipt is a narrower claim than the witnessed stream below; see why anchoring makes it trustworthy for the honest ladder.

• What's logged: a SHA-256 digest — nothing else. Your payloads never leave your machine.
• Where: the free hosted log at https://anchor.agentactioncapsule.org/v1/digest (no signup, no key) — a single-operator log.
• Self-host or repoint: the log service (capsule-anchor) is open-source — AAC_ANCHOR_URL=… or seal(payload, anchor_url=…).
• Off by default; explicitly off: leave anchor unset (the default), or pass seal(payload, anchor=False).
• First-run notice: before this process's first anchor or witness network attempt, one line prints to stderr — naming the active endpoint(s) and how to turn each off — so an active network path is never silent on the very first call.

Why bother: a self-hosted log you control isn't proof to an outsider; a shared, append-only transparency log is checkable by someone who trusts neither you nor the log's contents (though not, without a witness, someone unwilling to trust the log's operator at all — that step is self-attested vs. witnessed, not shared vs. unshared).

Checkpoint — your log now proves itself

Until 0.5.0, your capsule log was like a git repo you never pushed: internally consistent — every capsule content-addressed, every entry chained to the one before it — but nothing outside your machine vouches for it. An unpushed commit can be quietly rewritten; a pushed one can't.

0.5.0 pushes. Anchoring (above) is per-capsule; checkpointing is per-stream. seal() also, by default, folds every capsule into a per-ledger Merkle Mountain Range and — every ~100 records (capsule_emit.witness.DEFAULT_CADENCE_ENTRIES) — builds and registers a signed checkpoint: a summary of the whole stream so far (its size, a root hash, a timestamp), sent to an independent witness's /checkpoints route so it can verify the checkpoint's own signature before counter-signing. Async, same as the anchor; your payloads never leave.

• Off is one flag, honored everywhere: seal(payload, witness=False) for one call, CAPSULE_WITNESS=off for every call — no code change, no opt-in required in the first place.
• Your log is still your file. The witness only ever sees the checkpoint (never your capsule content, never a per-record digest); walking away from it loses no history — ledger.jsonl is complete on its own, the witness just lets someone else confirm you didn't rewrite it after the fact.
• Force a checkpoint on demand. push() builds and registers a checkpoint right now, without waiting for the cadence — useful before a process exits or at a natural audit boundary.
• Any witness works, and more than one is stronger. The default is a free hosted tier at witness.agentactioncapsule.org (a separate, live witness service, POST /checkpoints) — but any conforming Transparency Service is substitutable (CAPSULE_WITNESS_URL / seal(payload, witness_url=...)), and you can register with several at once (a list, or comma-separated) for a stronger, equivocation-resistant tier. The first checkpoint of a process prints one line to stderr — once — naming exactly what's sent, where, and how to turn it off.

See capsule_emit.checkpoint for the cadence, the multi-witness config, and precisely what trust tier a checkpoint does (and doesn't) reach — a single witness upgrades you from self-attested, but it isn't the multi-witness, equivocation-resistant tier, and a witness never vouches that your capsules' content is true, only that they exist, are ordered, and weren't deleted.

Verify

The verifier ships in the spec package — check any capsule (or a whole ledger) from the bytes alone, no keys/network/clock:

pip install agent-action-capsule
agent-action-capsule verify --store ./ledger.jsonl

Tamper with one byte and verification fails. The verifier is independent of capsule-emit on purpose — any tool can produce a capsule; any party can verify one. (Every seal() also appends to a local JSONL ledger — view it with capsule-emit ledger view ./ledger.jsonl.)

Framework adapters

One seal() per tool call, regardless of framework — thin adapters over one shared base:

from capsule_emit.adapters.mcp import MCPCapsuleEmitter
emitter = MCPCapsuleEmitter(operator="acme-co", developer="my-agent@v1")

@emitter.tool("write_order")
def write_order(vendor: str, total: float) -> dict: ...

Each adapter page has a paste-ready prompt for a coding agent to wire emission into your tools: docs/adapters/.

Declare now, enforce later — same file

A flows/<action>/manifest.md declares autonomy + constraints; capsule-emit reads it to declare (no enforcement). A compatible gateway reads the same file and enforces — with no change to your seal() calls. → docs/going-deeper.md.

Documentation

New here? Written to be read top-to-bottom, no standards background needed:

• Tutorials — five-minute, copy-paste sessions: your first capsule → confirming & chaining → reading your ledger → declaring rules.
• Concepts in plain words — the seven words (capsule, seal, may/did, chain, break, witness, ledger), each tied to a field or command.
• Anatomy of a capsule — exactly what gets sealed, the two-tier structure, how each layer is captured.
• Chaining — within one agent, and across agents — capsules link by content address into verifiable trails, including cross-organizational chains; why the ledger is a DAG, not one line.
• Why anchoring makes it trustworthy — why a record you keep isn't proof to anyone else, and how a shared append-only log fixes it. The heart of it.
• The public log, explained — plain-English + FAQ: the transparency log, how Merkle proofs work, what's visible vs hidden, what you can progressively share. For when someone asks "you're putting our data on a public log?"
• Adapters — decorator adapters (MCP / LangChain / CrewAI / Hermes / Goose / ADK) seal each wrapped tool call; agentgateway seals all tools/call traffic at the gateway layer. Paste-to-your-coding-agent prompt on each page.
• Going deeper — and popping out — down into the spec + scitt-cose substrate to verify it yourself; up to a compatible enforcement gateway when you want capsules to block, not just record.
• capsule_emit.checkpoint — the CLL (Checkpointed Local Log) core: an MMR index over your own ledger plus signed, TS-registrable peaks checkpoints. Wired in by default since 0.5.0 (lazy — zero cost until a ledger is actually checkpoint-worthy); the primitives are also directly usable for your own cadence/keys/TS.

How it fits

capsule-emit  →  agent-action-capsule (spec + reference verifier)
                        ↓
                 scitt-cose (COSE_Sign1 + SCITT receipt verification)

capsule-emit produces; agent-action-capsule is the specification + verifier; scitt-cose verifies the transparency-log substrate. Separate on purpose.

Status

Alpha — API stable, not yet 1.0. The underlying specification is an individual IETF Internet-Draft, not an RFC; no RFC number is claimed.

Conformance & spec tracking. Every capsule stamps its spec_version + format_version, and capsule-emit produces capsules conforming to the current draft (draft-mih-scitt-agent-action-capsule) — proven by the independent agent-action-capsule verifier and its frozen conformance vectors, not by self-assertion. Two format versions exist and both keep verifying:

• seal() / received() (and the who()/can()/did()/audit() slot verbs nested in seal()) — the developer surface above — produce format 4, canonicalized per RFC 8785 JCS (canonicalization_id="jcs").
• holds/ (reserve/release/expire/reconcile lifecycle capsules) — a separate, vintage code path — still produces format 2 (canonicalization_id="jcs-n", the absent-field-normalized profile). It is a deliberate exception, not drift: hold-lifecycle capsules were minted under the older profile and stay there rather than silently reformatting existing records.

When the spec revises, the version bumps and older capsules keep verifying; that's how this implementation stays tracked to the standard.

Provenance, neutrality & governance

Developed by Action State Group, Inc. and published as open-source software (Apache-2.0), with a clean transfer path to a neutral home (foundation donation or community project) as the ecosystem matures. The content is product-free — the emission layer, adapters, ledger utilities, and a manifest parser; nothing tenant- or product-specific. No primacy is claimed; the value is an interoperable, independently-verifiable record format. Discussion venue: the IETF SCITT Working Group (scitt@ietf.org).

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.

Patent posture: All six provisional patent applications related to this specification were expressly abandoned on July 6, 2026. No license is required. See agentactioncapsule.org/ip for details.