@agentkitai/agentgate-ucp

The approval gate for unattended UCP buying agents.

 

▶ Play the interactive walkthrough  ·  read the launch post

A thin MCP server ("the gate") that a buying agent connects to instead of a merchant's UCP checkout endpoint. It re-exposes the UCP checkout tools 1:1 and passes everything through — except it runs a policy / approval / evidence layer before money moves.

UCP's escalation model assumes a human is present at the surface. For unattended agents — scheduled replenishment, procurement, background jobs — nobody is watching. This is the missing approval layer, plus a tamper-evident record of every gated purchase.

The agent still speaks plain UCP. It never learns there's a gate in front of the merchant; it just sometimes gets an escalation back (with a link a human resolves) instead of a completed order.

Run

npx @agentkitai/agentgate-ucp        # run the gate (or: npm i -g @agentkitai/agentgate-ucp)

Configure via environment (see .env.example) — required: MCP_AUTH_TOKEN (the bearer token agents present on /mcp), MERCHANT_URL, AGENTGATE_URL, AGENTGATE_API_KEY, and AGENTGATE_WEBHOOK_SECRET (the decision webhook moves money, so it must be signed). FormBridge and AgentLens are optional (unset each and that seam passes through). Then point your agent's MCP client at $PUBLIC_URL/mcp (default http://localhost:8787/mcp) with Authorization: Bearer $MCP_AUTH_TOKEN.

What it does — three gate points

The five checkout tools (create / get / update / complete / cancel_checkout) pass straight through to the merchant. Three seams add control:

① Spend policy — on complete_checkout, the gate fetches the merchant's authoritative totals (never the agent-supplied amount), evaluates them against AgentGate spend policy, and either forwards, denies, or parks the completion. A parked purchase waits for a human's approval (Slack / dashboard) and is replayed out-of-band — with the original idempotency key — the moment they approve.

② Merchant escalations — when the merchant itself answers a completion with a requires_escalation (an inventory hold, a fraud review), the gate surfaces it faithfully to the agent — never misreporting a held order as placed.

③ Buyer-input form handoff — when the merchant needs a field only a human can supply (requires_buyer_input), the gate resolves the real UCP field schema at that JSONPath, builds a typed FormBridge form, and hands back a resume link. The human fills it; the gate writes the answer back to its exact path, update_checkouts, and re-drives completion through the spend gate again.

Evidence — every gated purchase is provable

The gate self-emits a hash-chained timeline of each purchase into AgentLens, keyed one session per checkout (received → decision → parked → approved/replayed → placed).

• Tier A works with any AgentLens: GET /api/audit/verify?sessionId=ucp_<checkout> proves the chain is intact (verified:true, brokenChains:[]).
• Tier B (AgentLens configured with a signing key + agent-token verification): a signed, portable, offline-verifiable agentlens.evidence-pack/v1 keyed on a server-derived verified_agent_id — dispute-grade proof that this agent made this purchase, checkable without the database.

Architecture

Buying agent ──MCP──▶  agentgate-ucp  ──REST──▶  Merchant UCP checkout
                          │   ▲   │
            spend policy  │   │   └───emit───▶  AgentLens   (hash-chained evidence)
                          ▼   │
                     AgentGate  ──▶ Slack / dashboard   (human approves)
                          │
                    decision webhook (HMAC) ──▶ gate replays the parked completion

   requires_buyer_input ──▶ FormBridge (typed form) ──▶ human ──▶ answer-back
                            webhook (HMAC) ──▶ gate writes answer, re-drives complete

Try it — the live demo

demo/run-demo.sh stands up all five services locally and drives four scenarios end to end, capturing a transcript:

	Scenario	Proves
A	over-spend	parked → human approves in AgentGate → decision webhook → replayed → completed
B	under-spend	auto-approved, completes immediately
C	merchant hold	a merchant requires_escalation surfaced faithfully (no order placed)
D	buyer-input	typed FormBridge form → human fills → answer-back → re-drive → completed, with a verified AgentLens chain

bash demo/run-demo.sh   # merchant :3100, agentgate :4000, formbridge :8091, gate :8787

See demo/README.md for the topology and the recorded demo/transcript.txt.

Security posture

• Authenticated endpoint. /mcp requires a bearer MCP_AUTH_TOKEN — an unauthenticated request never reaches the merchant. The gate refuses to start without the token.
• Authoritative amounts, fail-closed. The spend gate reads totals from the merchant, never from the agent-supplied object; a checkout with no valid grand total is refused, not gated as $0. The approved total is re-checked immediately before the charge (an ungated update_checkout can't slip a pricier cart past the gate), and a buyer's form answer that changes the total is re-gated on the re-drive.
• Fail-closed webhooks (both). The AgentGate and FormBridge webhooks are HMAC-verified over the raw body, are only registered when their secret is set, and the gate refuses to start without them — no unsigned decision or answer-back can move money.
• At-least-once + tamper safe. Parked completions replay the stored snapshot with the pinned idempotency key, not the webhook's params, and are resumed via an atomic claim (with a crash-recovery lease) so a duplicate delivery can't double-place and a mid-replay crash can't strand a human-approved order.
• Hardened JSONPath. Buyer-input answers write to exactly one concrete location; __proto__/constructor/prototype and wildcard/filter/negative-index paths are rejected (no prototype pollution, no fan-out).
• Crash-recoverable. Parked forms use a lease so a mid-flight crash can never strand an answered order.

Hardened by two independent adversarial reviews (a multi-lens workflow + Codex gpt-5.5) — 30+ findings fixed before release, each with a regression test.

Develop

npm install
cp .env.example .env     # MCP_AUTH_TOKEN / MERCHANT_URL / AGENTGATE_URL / AGENTGATE_API_KEY / AGENTGATE_WEBHOOK_SECRET required
npm run dev              # gate on :8787, MCP at /mcp
npm run typecheck
npm test                 # 151 tests
npm run build && node dist/index.js

Local topology: merchant :3100, AgentGate :4000, FormBridge :8091, AgentLens :3000, gate :8787. Every integration (AgentGate aside) is optional — unset its URL and that seam passes through untouched.

Status

Gate points 1–3 + evidence complete and demo-verified end to end. Targets the merged UCP checkout surface (requires_escalation + messages[] + continue_url); tracking the in-flight Actions primitive (UCP #553).

MIT.