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0012. Move the @context URI to a domain we control

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-08-01
  • Supersedes the provisional @context URL introduced with the v0.1 draft

Context

Every Agent Manifest carries a JSON-LD @context. Through v0.1 that value was:

https://agentmanifest.agentrust.io/v0.1/context.json

The authority component of that URL, agentrust.io, is not a domain this project has ever controlled. Verified 2026-08-01: it is registered to a third party through GoDaddy behind Domains By Proxy, registered 2025-06-09 and paid through 2027-06-09. It serves a parked lander and has no MX or TXT records. It is absent from both the Opaque GoDaddy and Cloudflare accounts. The only acquisition route offered is a $99.99 non-refundable broker approach to an anonymous owner.

Two consequences follow, and only the first is cosmetic:

  1. The context URL has never resolved, so no consumer has ever been able to dereference it. JSON-LD tolerates this, but a @context that cannot be fetched is a latent defect in an identity specification.
  2. More seriously, every manifest we have issued is named under a domain belonging to somebody else. If that owner ever serves content at the path, they control the semantics of documents that claim to be Agent Manifests. For a specification whose entire purpose is establishing who an agent is and who vouched for it, an identifier we do not control is a contradiction.

This is the same defect that TRACE resolved in its v0.2 profile migration (agentrust-io/trace-spec#107), where the tag URI tag:agentrust.io,2026:trace-v0.1 was found to be invalid under RFC 4151 for exactly this reason. That migration set the precedent this ADR follows.

Decision

The @context URI becomes:

https://manifest.agentrust-io.com/v0.2/context.json

agentrust-io.com is registered to Opaque at Cloudflare and manifest.agentrust-io.com already serves the Agent Manifest documentation.

The version is bumped to v0.2 and consumers cut over. They do not dual-accept. The v0.1 URL is withdrawn and MUST NOT be accepted. This mirrors TRACE, and the reasoning is the same: an implementation that continued honouring the v0.1 URL would keep validating manifests named under a domain we do not own, which is precisely the condition being fixed. A permissive migration would leave the defect in place indefinitely.

The manifest format itself does not change. No field is added, removed or re-typed. v0.2 differs from v0.1 in the @context value alone. The version bump exists to force the cut-over, not to signal a schema change.

Consequences

  • Breaking for any consumer pinning the v0.1 context URL. This requires a coordinated SDK release, as TRACE did across agentrust-trace and agentrust-trace-tests.
  • Manifests already issued under v0.1 remain checkable against the v0.1 specification, which stays published.
  • The AAIF handover commitment is unchanged. The spec still states that the working group will assign the canonical URL before v1.0 ratification, and that manifest.agentrust-io.com transfers to AAIF-controlled infrastructure as a condition of v1.0 acceptance. This decision changes which provisional domain we hand over, not whether we hand it over.
  • The new URL does not resolve yet either. Serving the context document at manifest.agentrust-io.com/v0.2/context.json is follow-up work and should be tracked separately. The difference that matters now is that we can serve it whenever we choose, because the domain is ours.

Alternatives considered

Swap the host, stay at v0.1. Smallest change, but it lets old and new identifiers coexist, so nothing forces consumers off an identifier naming a third party's domain. Rejected for the same reason TRACE rejected dual-acceptance.

Buy agentrust.io. $99.99 non-refundable to open a negotiation with an anonymous owner who registered the name deliberately and has paid through mid-2027, with no guarantee of sale and no ceiling on price. Rejected as poor value against a rename that costs nothing.

Wait for the AAIF namespace. Leaves a known-defective identifier live in a published, widely-starred repository for an unbounded period, since ratification has no date. Rejected.