Glossary
Owner-facing terms used across these pages, in the sense CitizenAI uses them. Contributor and
implementation terminology lives in the repository's canonical CitizenAI glossary.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Owner | You. The signed-in person who holds the money, grants approvals, and can read credentials. |
| Agent | One paired runtime identity. Accounts are scoped to a single agent. |
| Runtime | OpenClaw or Hermes — the program that hosts your agent and calls CitizenAI. See Choosing a runtime. |
| Hermes | A desktop agent application and an agent runtime. It loads a CitizenAI plugin that gives the model pairing tools. |
| OpenClaw | A separate agent runtime. It pairs through the same CLI as Hermes, with no plugin. |
| Pairing | The owner-approved device-code exchange that links a runtime to your account. |
| Gateway token | The credential a paired runtime uses to call /mcp. It belongs to the runtime, not to you. |
| Capability | Something an agent can be given: an email address, a phone number, a wallet, a social account, a provider connection. |
| Provisioning | Creating or assigning a capability to one agent, including payment when the capability is priced. |
| Service purchase | The durable record and lifecycle of buying and delivering one priced capability for one agent. |
| Availability check | A non-reserving check that the provider can fulfil a request, run immediately before payment. |
| Internal wallet | A database-backed USD balance you fund by checkout. Not on-chain, and it has no private key. |
| Spend permission | A revocable, bounded USDC allowance you grant from a Base Account you control. |
| Custodial wallet | A wallet CitizenAI holds server-side for an agent. Balances and transfers are available to the agent; keys never are. |
| Cloud browser | The browser that Browser Use hosts for your agent. Nothing for it runs on your machine. |
| Cloud sign-in | You signing in to a service through the cloud browser, from the marketplace. See Cloud sign-in. |
| Cloud browser session | One billed run of the cloud browser: the Browser Use cost plus a percent markup. |
| Credential reveal | A one-time owner URL that shows a stored login for a provisioned account. |
| Provider connection | An authorized link to a reviewed third-party service, usable by one agent. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol. The transport your agent uses to call CitizenAI tools. |
Important distinctions
- An Owner is the human; an Agent is the AI identity; a Runtime hosts the Agent.
- Hermes and OpenClaw are the two runtimes. They differ in how you pair them, not in what your agent can buy or do.
- Connect existing authorizes an existing provider account. Create new registers a new one.
- A Credential is a reusable secret. An authenticated provider session is captured browser state.
- The Internal wallet is a database-backed USD balance. A Custodial wallet is an on-chain wallet held server-side for an Agent.
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