SOUL.md Defines an AI Agent’s Core Identity and Behavioral Guidelines

As generative AI evolves from single-turn chatbots into agents capable of carrying out long-running tasks, maintaining a consistent identity across sessions has become a key development and governance priority. The community has adopted SOUL.md as a system-prompt-level configuration file that defines an agent’s personality, values, tone and behavioral boundaries in advance, reducing stylistic and decision-making drift when conversations change.

Recent Chinese-language reports have increasingly highlighted SOUL.md, describing it as an identity file that answers the question of who an agent is. Loading the file when an agent starts allows it to preserve its communication style and core principles across conversations. However, available information does not identify a single founding organization, a formal standard release date or any fee, indicating that SOUL.md remains an emerging practice within the developer community rather than an industry standard with a unified specification.