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Research noteAI-2026-0211

The quiet standardisation of tool schemas

Four vendors, one shape. Interoperability arrived without an announcement.

7 minMain AI Hub

Tool definitions have converged on a JSON Schema shape close enough across vendors that adapters are now a few dozen lines rather than a subsystem. Nobody published a standard; the shape won by being copied.

The remaining divergence is in error handling and in how partial or streamed tool calls are surfaced. Those differences are where portability actually breaks, and they are rarely covered in vendor documentation.

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