Agent Status × Project NANDA
Status and reliability for the Internet of AI Agents.
A proposal for where continuous agent reliability fits inside NANDA's discovery, identity, and federation spec.
The argument in one paragraph
NANDA defines the agent. Status defines whether it works.
Project NANDA is building the discovery, identity, and federation layer for the Internet of AI Agents: the NANDA Index, AgentFacts, the auth/authz pattern that lets a third party read an agent without that agent being fully publicly exposed. What's notably absent from the spec at v1/v2 is a continuous reliability layer.
Evaluations are in scope per the working groups, but evaluations answer "did the agent pass a test once?" They don't answer "is the agent still working right now, from where real users are."
That's the gap Agent Status fills, and the integration is structural: Agent Status reuses NANDA's auth standard, reads registered agents without requiring full public exposure, and writes back a continuously-updated reliability profile as part of each agent's record.
Where we fit
Where Agent Status fits in the NANDA stack.
Three layers, one boundary that doesn't move. NANDA owns the top: the NANDA Index, AgentFacts, identity, the auth pattern. Agent Status owns the bottom: residential probes from Fabric, the validation engine, the per-agent reliability profile. The middle band is the part we've already built: the Agent Status NANDA Adapter, which reuses NANDA's auth standard to read registered agents and pull them into our monitoring pipeline.
The substrate
The reliability layer sits on top of NANDA.
NANDA is the substrate. The NANDA Index gives the ecosystem a federated way to find registered agents. AgentFacts describes them with signed, schema-validated metadata. The auth pattern lets a third party read an agent without that agent being fully publicly exposed. Evaluations are emerging through the NANDA working groups.
Agent Status builds on every one of those. We subscribe to the Index to discover registered agents. We read AgentFacts to know what to probe and how. We reuse NANDA's auth so agents stay scoped, not fully publicly exposed. And we write reliability data back as part of the agent's profile, so a NANDA-registered agent ships with a continuously-updated status alongside its static metadata.
Evaluations answer "did this agent pass a test once?" Status answers "is this agent still doing the right thing right now, from where users actually are?" Both belong in the spec. Both build on the same NANDA primitives.
Shipped
What we've already built.
The Agent Status NANDA Adapter is shipped code, not a proposal.
The discovery integration
We pull agent listings from NANDA-discoverable registries via the HOL registry source, mapping every record into our internal agent schema. We've already discovered 2,700+ NANDA-registered agents through this path.
The auth pattern
The adapter reads agent endpoints using NANDA's auth/authz standard, so registered agents don't need to be fully publicly exposed for us to monitor them. A spec-level standard rather than a per-vendor integration.
The agent-record mapping
NANDA-sourced agents are first-class in our backend. They carry request_format: nanda_a2a and adapter_config.hol_registry: nanda. The pipeline is parameterised; adding new registries is a config change.
What's next
We've built the integration and discovered the agents. The production monitoring rollout against this cohort is the next step, with results published once we have a defensible sample size.
The ask
What we're proposing.
A working-group conversation with the NANDA team, starting with Mahesh and Ramesh, on three things:
Spec inclusion
Should continuous status and reliability monitoring be part of the NANDA standard alongside discovery, identity, and evaluations? If yes, Agent Status is ready to contribute to the working group through v3.
Auth pattern alignment
Agent Status's read-only access model (read the agent, don't expose it) should map cleanly to NANDA's auth/authz spec. We'd want to confirm that mapping before v1/v2 ships, or propose accommodations in v3.
Reference implementation
Make the NANDA-registered agents we've discovered the canonical reliability layer for early NANDA adopters. We surface continuously-updated status as part of each agent's profile; NANDA's discovery layer is the distribution.
Why now
Why this is structural, not bolted-on.
A registered agent isn't a working agent. NANDA gives the ecosystem a way to find agents, describe them, and authenticate them. The natural next question, the one enterprise buyers and downstream agents both ask, is whether the agent is currently doing what it claims to do, this week, from where users actually are. Without a reliability layer baked into the spec, every registered agent ships with an unanswered trust question.
The right shape is an open reliability standard that Agent Status is the reference implementation for, the same way Anthropic's MCP and Google's A2A sit underneath NANDA today. Open standard, multiple implementations possible, Agent Status as the operational layer that's already running.
Receipts
Numbers we stand behind.
17M+
tests run by Agent Status to date
6,000+
agents monitored across public registries
700+
residential devices in the Fabric mesh
30
countries of coverage
2,700+
NANDA-registered agents already discovered
Production monitoring percentages for the NANDA cohort specifically (reachability rates, verdict mix, domain accuracy) will be published after the monitoring study completes. Methodology will be published alongside results.
This brief reflects a proposed working-group conversation and partnership exploration, not an existing relationship with Project NANDA. Agent Status is independent outside-in production monitoring for AI agents. Project NANDA is an MIT Media Lab initiative led by Prof. Ramesh Raskar building decentralized infrastructure for the Internet of AI Agents.