Instance

Instance is a persistent copy provisioned from a release for one privacy domain, such as a user, customer, team, project, or job, with its own history and lifecycle.

The people, records, and work that may safely share one workspace form a privacy domain. The agent can read its entire workspace, so information belongs together only when the agent may safely combine it. A Financial Advisor Agent gets one instance per person or household, depending on who is authorized to share financial records. A business-to-business (B2B) support agent can keep one customer’s tickets together but needs a separate instance for another customer. A virtual marketing employee can share one instance with a team. This separation limits the damage from prompt injection. A user can try to make the agent reveal anything it can read. The instance should therefore contain only information that every authorized user may allow the agent to use. The same rule applies to tools and retrieval systems: a call made for one user should return only information that user may access. Authentication controls who may use an instance. Several teammates can use one shared instance, while an administrator may manage many private instances. The stable instance identity routes work to the right workspace. It records whom the agent represents and what it may do; its history records what it has done. An instance either acts for its users with their delegated authority or has an identity of its own, such as its own email address or directory account. The choice decides who is accountable for its actions and how revocation reaches it. Some consumer products give each person one instance that hosts several agents, including agents published by other people. The paper treats the person’s agent as the application and the published agents as components installed into it.

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Release, instance, and session

An application continues across releases. A release fixes one version of the agent project and its resolved dependency graph. Deployment creates instances from that release, and each period of activity becomes a session. The instance lasts across those sessions and may later move to a newer release. Many managed agent runtimes keep files and history per session and call that unit a session. Such a session plays part of the instance role, but the runtime does not know whose it is: the customer’s code maps each person or team to a session. An instance makes that privacy domain part of the platform. Instances created from the same release diverge as their workspaces accumulate different information and instructions. Lineage records those changes. The instance carries identity, ownership, authority, lifecycle, and lineage. The Agent Workspace holds the durable working state and computational environment used by the agent. Keeping them separate lets an operator restore or move the workspace without changing the instance’s identity or permissions. See the paper’s sections on privacy domains, application lifetimes, and instance identity.