ABI vs Agent Core: The Battle of Open Source vs Corporate
Joselo Martinez
A Line in the Sand
Somewhere in late June 2025, under the light of a thousand tabs, I planted a seed: a modular, semantic, agent-based infrastructure. Not an experiment, not a proof-of-concept, but a vision. ABI (Agent-Based Infrastructure) wasn’t born out of hype or marketing—it was born out of frustration. A realization that modern infrastructure is broken, bloated, patched over and over with plugins instead of rebuilt from the ground up.
So I started from scratch. Wrote the whitepaper. Launched the public repo. Built the core agents. Shared the architecture. Designed for context-awareness, semantic memory, and modular reasoning. I wasn’t following the trend—I was trying to reset the foundation.
Then came Agent Core, Amazon’s corporate take on the same idea.
What’s the Same?
Both embrace agent-based orchestration.
Both separate control (orchestrator) from execution (workers).
Both rely on a shared context layer, modular logic, and distributed cognition.
Even the naming conventions are eerily close: Agent Core, Agent Base, Toolbox, Skills... come on.
What’s Different?
| ABI (Open Source) | Agent Core (AWS) |
| Fully open source and community-driven | Closed ecosystem, AWS-locked |
| Designed to be model-agnostic (GPT, Claude, Mistral, LLaMA) | Optimized for Bedrock models only |
| Semantic and ontology-driven (JSON-LD, RDF, A2A Protocol) | Skills and plugins based, less structured context |
| Local-first design (runs on a laptop, a cluster, or the edge) | Cloud-native by default |
| Open policy, explainability and traceability | Black box for most users |
Why It Matters
Agent Core is powerful. Backed by Amazon. And that’s exactly the problem.
We’re not just building tools—we’re building the future substrate of AI infrastructure. Whoever controls the orchestration layer controls how agents talk, reason, and even what they’re allowed to know.
That’s why ABI matters. It’s not just a project. It’s a movement.
Contribute
If you believe the infrastructure of the future shouldn’t be locked behind APIs or gated by clouds, join us:
Github: https://github.com/Joselo-zn/ABI
Discord: https://discord.gg/tKKVNxQx
🚀 ABI is an open-source, personal side project exploring the future of Agent-Based Infrastructure. All views and work are my own and not affiliated with my employer.
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