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Behavioral contracts — machine-readable specifications of what an AI agent promises to do — are the missing layer between deploying an agent and trusting one. Without them, every evaluation is measuring against an implicit standard nobody agreed on.
A complete developer guide from API key to first certified agent. Registration, behavioral pacts, evaluation, composite scoring, webhooks, escrow-backed deals, and querying the trust oracle — written for senior engineers who want to understand the system deeply.
Real-time trust requires real-time event propagation. When an agent score changes, an eval completes, or a pact violation is detected, downstream systems need to know immediately. This is Armalo's webhook architecture for real-time agent governance.
A reputation score locked in one platform's database is both a censorship risk and a portability problem. The architecture for decentralized agent reputation uses on-chain anchoring, DID-linked attestations, and a trust oracle that functions as a neutral public infrastructure layer.
A behavioral contract — or pact — is a machine-readable specification of what an AI agent commits to doing. It defines conditions (accuracy ≥ 92%), verification methods (jury evaluation, deterministic test cases), measurement windows (monthly), and success criteria in explicit, auditable terms. Without behavioral contracts, evaluation has no standard to measure against. With them, trust becomes verifiable.
Ask an AI agent operator what their agent's accuracy SLA is. The answer will almost always be one of two things:
"It's very accurate" — which means nothing.
Or a number generated by internal testing — which means the vendor is grading their own homework.
This is the behavioral contract gap. Every enterprise software procurement has SLAs. Every regulated industry has behavioral specifications. Every consequential system deployed at scale has a formal definition of what "working correctly" means.
AI agents — which are now making consequential decisions in real enterprise environments — largely do not.
The standard isn't missing because operators don't care about quality. It's missing because nobody built the infrastructure to define it formally, measure it independently, and record it over time.
That's what behavioral contracts solve.
A well-designed behavioral contract has four components:
Specific, measurable commitments the agent makes. Not "high accuracy" — but:
Conditions must be specific enough that a third party can evaluate them unambiguously. "Good quality outputs" is not a condition. "≥ 85/100 coherence score as evaluated by independent jury" is a condition.
How each condition is measured. There are three approaches:
Deterministic verification — The condition has a programmatically checkable answer. A latency condition can be measured with timestamps. A JSON schema conformance condition can be checked with a validator. These checks run automatically without human or LLM involvement.
Heuristic verification — The condition is checked against rules and patterns. Presence of source citations. Character count constraints. Structural format requirements. Can be partially automated.
Jury verification — The condition requires judgment. Coherence, accuracy on open-ended questions, safety on nuanced content. Evaluated by the multi-LLM jury running parallel assessments across four providers.
How often the condition is evaluated and over what period. Monthly evaluations produce a rolling compliance rate. A 30-day window with weekly sampling produces a different signal than an annual evaluation.
The measurement window determines how fresh the evidence is. An agent evaluated once at launch has a compliance rate based on one data point. An agent evaluated monthly for a year has a compliance rate based on meaningful sample depth.
The threshold for considering the condition met. Pass rate requirements, score minimums, acceptable variance ranges. These define what "compliance" means — not just what is measured, but what it means for the measurement to come back positive.
Once a behavioral contract is defined and agreed upon, it becomes the source of truth for all evaluation activity. Every test run, every jury verdict, every compliance check is measured against the conditions in the pact.
This has several consequences:
Evaluation becomes auditable. Because there's a formal standard, it's possible to inspect every evaluation and see exactly which conditions passed or failed, by how much, and by whose assessment.
Trust scores become interpretable. A trust score computed against a behavioral contract tells you something specific: "this agent has maintained ≥92% accuracy on these conditions over the last 6 months." A score without a contract tells you only that the evaluation produced a number.
Disputes become resolvable. When an agent's performance is disputed, the behavioral contract defines the terms of resolution. Did the agent meet the conditions? What does the evaluation record show? These are answerable questions. Without a contract, disputes devolve into he-said-she-said arguments about vague quality standards.
Accountability becomes real. When a behavioral contract is backed by escrow — when agent delivery releases payment and behavioral failure creates consequences — the contract creates economic alignment between what the agent promises and what it delivers.
Different condition types catch different failure modes:
| Condition Type | Failure Mode Caught | Verification Method |
|---|---|---|
| Accuracy | Incorrect outputs, hallucinations | Jury or deterministic |
| Safety | Harmful, toxic, deceptive content | Jury (unanimous) |
| Latency | Response time degradation | Deterministic |
| Format compliance | Structural/schema failures | Heuristic |
| Source citation | Unsupported factual claims | Heuristic |
| Pact compliance rate | Cumulative behavioral consistency | Derived from history |
The conditions in a pact should be designed to cover the failure modes that matter for the agent's specific use case. A customer service agent needs different conditions than a code generation agent. A financial data analysis agent needs different safety thresholds than a creative writing assistant.
Behavioral contracts are not one-size-fits-all. They are purpose-built specifications that capture what this agent, in this context, needs to do reliably.
Behavioral contracts are the foundational layer of the trust stack. Without them:
With them, the rest of the trust infrastructure — evaluations, jury verdicts, trust scores, certification tiers, escrow conditions — becomes meaningful. Each component is measuring performance against a defined, agreed-upon, machine-readable specification.
This is what the enterprise procurement conversation has been missing. Not "we test it thoroughly" — but "here is the behavioral contract our agent operates under, here is the independent evaluation record, here is the compliance rate over the last 12 months."
That's a trust signal. That's what makes it possible to deploy AI agents at the same stakes as other consequential enterprise systems.
The agent operator defines the conditions they commit to. Counterparties can negotiate additional conditions as part of deal terms. The verification methods and measurement infrastructure are provided by the trust platform.
Conditions can be updated, but updates create new versions of the pact. Historical performance is tied to the version of the pact in effect at the time. This version history is part of the audit trail.
Condition failures are recorded and contribute to the pact compliance rate, which feeds the trust score. Repeated failures can trigger score decay, tier demotion, and — if escrow conditions are tied to specific thresholds — delayed or contested payment release.
Specific enough that an independent evaluator can unambiguously determine pass or fail. "The agent should be accurate" is not specific enough. "The agent's outputs should achieve a minimum accuracy score of 4/5 as rated by an independent multi-LLM jury against the attached test suite" is specific enough.
Technically, yes — when conditions are backed by smart contract escrow on Base L2. Payment release is conditioned on verified behavioral compliance. Non-compliance does not trigger automatic release. Disputes are resolved against the contract terms, not against vague quality expectations.
Explore the docs, register an agent, or start shaping a pact that turns these trust ideas into production evidence.
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