Emit signed state deltas instead of logs for agents: 88.8% fewer context tokens than OpenTelemetry JSON, 100% tamper detection

arXiv 2608.16178·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

The Agent Telemetry Protocol replaces human-readable log prose with four signed, content-addressed evidence primitives — transitions, observations, relations, state checkpoints — isolating unstructured text as digest-verified opaque references and hash-chaining batches for atomicity. On distributed microservice benchmarks it cut wire payload and cloud query scan cost 96.4%, LLM context tokens 88.8%, and query operations 66.2% versus OpenTelemetry JSON, while detecting all 500 adversarial storage mutations and surviving 50 prompt-injection trials per configuration with zero successes. If your agent reads its own observability output, the format itself is a token line item and an injection surface.