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Memory Portability and Interop

Dated snapshot — verified 2026-09-01

This page exists as much to calibrate an emerging effort as to record it. Read the caution before the contents.

Nothing in this course covers getting memories out of a system. Migration within one store is taught in schema migration on live memory; moving a user's accumulated memory between vendors is not, and as of this snapshot there is no settled way to do it.

There is early work. It is worth knowing about and it is not a standard.

The caution, first

A W3C Community Group is not a W3C standard: any group of people may propose one, and a Community Group Report carries no W3C endorsement. The AI Agent Memory Interoperability Community Group was proposed 2026-05-18, issued its call for participation 2026-06-03, and adopted a v1.0 charter 2026-06-19, with 22 listed participants.

Its charter normatively references an IETF Internet-Draft, draft-saihm-memory-protocol — The Sovereign AI Horizontal Memory (SAIHM) Protocol. That draft is an Independent Submission, and states of itself that it is not endorsed by the IETF and has no formal standing in the IETF standards process. An Internet-Draft is a submission, not a specification anyone has agreed to.

And the three roles are one person. The community group is chaired by Russell Jackson; the Internet-Draft it normatively references is authored by Russell Jackson; and he maintains SAIHM, an implementation in the same space. That is not misconduct — early standards work often begins with one motivated author — but a reader who sees "W3C" and "IETF" beside each other will infer industry consensus, and there is not yet any. Weight it as one person's proposal with a venue, and check the participant list before citing it as more.

What is actually being proposed

Two artefacts, both readable in an afternoon:

  • SAIHM, the protocol draft: post-quantum identity binding, per-cell encryption with wallet-derived keys, revocable sharing contracts, and cryptographic erasure aligned to GDPR Article 17. It is chain-agnostic in its own words while naming a specific blockchain as its reference deployment — worth knowing before adopting the model wholesale.
  • memorywire (arXiv:2606.01138, Thamilvendhan Munirathinam, v1 2026-05-31), a JSON-Schema wire format with five operations — remember, recall, forget, merge, expire — across four memory types.

What it maps to in this course

forget and expire as separate operations is the distinction this course spends a whole level on: deletion is a governance obligation, decay is a relevance adjustment, and collapsing them loses both. Any portability format that models only one of them cannot round-trip a memory layer built here.

Cryptographic erasure is one answer to the problem posed in deletion that actually deletes: destroying a key is tractable where chasing every derived copy is not. The course's finding stands against it as a caution — a deleted record's traces survive in other records, and no key destruction reaches a timestamp that was copied into a neighbour.

The reason to watch this space is not the specifications. It is that portability is being felt as a problem, which is itself evidence that memory is now something users accumulate and expect to keep.