Sphere v1: publishing built for agents, hosted by you

Two weeks ago I wrote about preparing public knowledge for AI agents. I called Sphere an experiment, and left it as a question:

What should public knowledge look like when the first reader may be an AI agent?

Today I am releasing v1. The experiment is now something you can run.

Sphere turns content into fragments. A fragment is a bounded unit of public knowledge that carries its own sources, license, provenance, and relations to other fragments. An agent reads the fragment and its contract. A person reads a rendered page at the same address. The fragment is the stable thing. Everything around it is replaceable.

In June this was a sandbox idea. It is now a running system, and the shape changed in one important way. There is no platform in the middle.

Three things ship.

A fragment contract, with a canonical schema, so a fragment means the same thing everywhere.

A self-hostable Sphere Node that runs on Cloudflare Workers. You deploy it into your own account with one button. The content, the access log, and the data stay with you. It serves the contract to agents and renders a readable page for people, from the same fragment.

A local Claude plugin that prepares, validates, and reports on your fragments before you publish, and reads the owner side of your own node. It hosts nothing and stores nothing.

One stance held the whole design: intelligence before monetization. The first value is understanding whether your content is ready to be read by an agent, what rights it carries, where it is thin. Payment exists only as a dormant seam in the protocol, not as a marketplace. Sphere is infrastructure you host, not a service someone runs for you.

The clearest way to show what this means is to ask the node itself. This is what an agent sees when it requests sphere.pub:

{
  "publisher": { "name": "Sphere" },
  "default_license": "CC-BY-NC",
  "fragment_count": 11,
  "fragments": [
    { "id": "2026-06-23-concept", "title": "Concept", "policy": "free" },
    { "id": "2026-06-23-format", "title": "Fragment Format", "policy": "free" }
  ]
}

The node that serves this is the same project, published as its own fragments. Sphere publishes itself.

This continues the line I started in June. It is still early, still personal, still independent. But it is no longer a description. It is a node you can deploy, a contract you can read, and a plugin you can install today.

If you publish anything you care about, deploy a node and see how an agent would read it.

The repositories, the documentation, and the deploy button are at sphere.pub.