Envelope Open Schema Spec

The Envelope Open Schema Spec is an open JSON schema published under the Apache 2.0 license that defines how AI agent teams are structured, configured, and deployed. It is the portable, runtime-agnostic foundation underlying the Envelope platform, allowing teams to be validated in an IDE, stored in Git, and deployed from CI without vendor lock-in. The schema lives at schema.openenvelope.org and is publicly accessible with no account or subscription required.

What It Is

The Envelope Open Schema Spec is a machine-readable JSON schema that describes the structure of an AI agent team definition — including agents, roles, tools, credentials, access policies, triggers, and memory configuration. Any conforming runtime can read and execute a team defined in this schema, making it a portable standard rather than a proprietary format. Envelope positions it as "the open standard for AI agent teams," analogous to how OpenAPI standardized REST API descriptions.

How It Fits Into the Envelope Platform

The schema is the underlying contract for everything built on the Envelope platform. When a user describes a workflow in plain language on openenvelope.org, Envelope generates a team definition that conforms to this schema. That definition can then be:

• Validated locally in an IDE using standard JSON Schema tooling
• Stored and versioned in a Git repository
• Deployed via CI/CD pipelines to Envelope's managed runtime or to self-hosted infrastructure (AWS Bedrock, Docker, a local Mac mini, etc.)
• Read and executed by any third-party runtime that implements the spec

This separation between the schema (open, portable) and the runtime (Envelope's managed service or self-hosted) is a deliberate architectural choice to avoid lock-in.

Key Schema Concepts

The schema captures the full operational definition of an agent team, including:

• Agent roles and structure — how individual agents are composed into a team
• Tool and credential bindings — which external services each agent can access
• Access policies — per-agent declarations of permitted hosts, methods, and fallback behavior
• Triggers — manual, scheduled (cron), webhook, or condition-based start conditions
• Human review gates — checkpoints requiring sign-off before an action proceeds
• Team memory — read/write memory shared across runs for self-improving behavior

Deployment and Runtime Flexibility

Because the schema is Apache 2.0 licensed and fully public, developers can build validators, adapters, and integrations against it without any Envelope subscription. The Envelope platform itself supports deploying schema-conforming teams to its own managed runtime, to AWS Bedrock, to Paperclip, via Docker, or locally. The schema travels with the team definition, meaning security policies such as SSRF protection and static access policies are enforced at the definition level regardless of where the team runs.

Developer Access and Tooling

The schema reference is documented at openenvelope.org/docs/schema. The GitHub organization at github.com/openenvelope hosts the open-source components. API access for managing teams, triggering runs, reading audit logs, and configuring workspaces programmatically is available on all Envelope plans including the free tier. The schema itself requires no account or plan to use in external tooling.