How can agent self-evolution be made safe and auditable?

Self-evolving agents that adjust strategies, refine instructions, and update tools from feedback are emerging as a path to robust autonomy. But implementations are fragmented and ad hoc: without shared standards, evolution is neither composable nor auditable, and developers fall back on brittle glue code producing monolithic, unmaintainable architectures. Existing agent protocols (A2A, MCP) under-specify cross-entity lifecycle, version tracking, and evolution-safe update interfaces.

The Autogenesis Protocol (AGP) imposes a two-layer separation that decouples what evolves from how evolution occurs. The Resource Substrate Protocol Layer models prompts, agents, tools, environments, and memory as protocol-registered resources with explicit state, lifecycle, and versioned interfaces. The Self-Evolution Protocol Layer specifies a closed-loop operator interface for proposing, assessing, and committing improvements — with auditable lineage and rollback.

The conceptual contribution is treating evolution as a governed process rather than an emergent side effect of agents editing themselves. Versioning, lineage, and rollback are the safety primitives: you can attribute a regression to a specific committed change and revert it. This is the infrastructure layer beneath capability findings like Do stronger models always evolve their own harnesses better? — that result assumes updates can be committed and measured at all, which is exactly what AGP standardizes. It also extends Should coordination protocols wrap existing systems or replace them?: AGP layers over A2A/MCP rather than replacing them.