Portable Agent Memory: A Protocol for Cryptographically-Verified Memory Transfer Across Heterogeneous AI Agents

Summary

We present Portable Agent Memory, an open protocol and reference implementation for transferring persistent memory state across heterogeneous AI agents. Modern AI agents accumulate rich context -- episodic events,semantic knowledge, procedural skills, working state, and identity preferences -- but this context remains locked within vendor-specific runtimes. Portable Agent Memory addresses this through: (1) a five-component structured memory model with content-addressable entries linked by a Merkle-DAG provenance graph providing tamper-evidence; (2) capability-based access control enabling selective, scoped disclosure of memory segments; (3) an injection-resistant rehydration protocol that adapts recalled content to heterogeneous target models while mitigating indirect prompt injection; and (4) a JSON-first serialization format with optional CBOR compaction for efficient transport. We provide a Python SDK with 54 passing tests, agent skills for multiple platforms, and demonstrate cross-model memory transfer between GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama architectures. The protocol is open-source under Apache 2.0.