The AKP specification
The AKP specification — an open format for portable, verifiable AI-ready knowledge.
AKP — AI Knowledge Package — is an open format for packaging organisational knowledge so that it can be read, verified and used by any AI system, and still be readable when that system has been replaced. A package carries the knowledge itself, the provenance of every piece of it, integrity information sufficient to detect tampering, and optionally the evaluations that demonstrate the knowledge answers the questions it claims to answer.
The format defines a boundary. Above it — models, agents, retrieval strategies, prompting — everything changes constantly. Below it — documents, databases, datasets, specialist expertise — knowledge originates in systems that outlive any of them. AKP is the contract between the two, and it deliberately standardises nothing on either side of it.
Two properties follow from that and are worth stating plainly, because they are the properties an implementer has to honour:
The information model is normative; the archive layout is not. A conformant implementation is one that preserves the information model, not one that produces a particular arrangement of files. Alternative serialisations are permitted.
Derived artifacts are not canonical. Embeddings, indexes and retrieval state are caches. Deleting them does not change what a package is or what it identifies as. An embedding model that has been superseded does not take the knowledge with it.
The current specification§
| Version | Maturity | Published | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Version 1.0-rc | Candidate | 2026-09-07 | The information model, believed complete: the container, the input formats a producer must accept, knowledge objects and their identity, the anchor grammar, integrity and what is signed. Adds the reserved-vocabulary section, the OWFa 1.0 licence and patent position, and the checklist a stable 1.0 has to satisfy. |
| Version 0.2 | Draft | 2026-09-05 | Defines the container, the input formats a producer must accept, how knowledge objects are declared and identified, the anchor grammar that carries provenance, integrity and what is signed. |
Licence and terms§
The specification licence and the patent position are not yet decided. The constraint on both is fixed — the terms must permit anyone to implement the specification without restriction or permission — but the wording is not settled and is not published as though it were. See licence and intellectual property.
AKP is the name of the format and is freely usable to describe conformant implementations and artifacts. Stemmar is the wordmark of the organisation that maintains the specification, and is not. See the trademark policy.
Where to go next§
- Read the specification — the normative information model, with citable anchors on every section and requirement.
- Find an implementation — every known implementation, listed on identical terms in a neutral order.
- Read the governance terms — change controller, change process, licence, IPR, trademark and contribution terms.