Open Agent Specification (Agent Spec) Technical Report

Open Agent Specification (Agent Spec) is a declarative language for defining AI agents and workflows in a way that is compatible across different AI frameworks, promoting portability and interoperability within AI Agent frameworks. Agent Spec aims to resolve the challenges of fragmented agent development by providing a common unified specification that allows AI agents to be designed once and deployed across various frameworks, improving interoperability and reusability, while reducing redundant efforts. Additionally, Agent Spec facilitates development tools and portability, allowing AI agents to be defined independently of their execution environment and enabling teams to exchange solutions without implementation-specific limitations. Agent Spec benefits four key groups: (i) Agent developers, who gain a superset of reusable components and design patterns, enabling them to leverage a broader range of functionalities; (ii) Agent framework and tool developers, who can use Agent Spec as an interchange format and therefore benefit from cross-framework and tool support; (iii) Researchers, who can achieve reproducible results and comparability, facilitating more reliable and consistent outcomes; (iv) Enterprises, which see faster prototype-to-deployment, increased productivity, and greater scalability and maintainability for their AI agent solutions. This technical report provides an overview of the technical foundations of Agent Spec, including motivation, benefits, and future work. We also introduce a standardized Evaluation harness to assess agent behavior and agentic workflows across runtimes (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and WayFlow), using three different benchmarks (SimpleQA Verified, $\tau^2$-Bench and BIRD-SQL) - analogous to how HELM and related harnesses standardized LLM evaluation - so that performance, robustness, and efficiency can be compared consistently across frameworks.