Portable agent evaluation tasks need explicit environments, permissions and graders

METR’s Task Standard packages an interactive task as an environment, instructions and an optional scoring function. Task families declare a standard version and can define setup, startup, permissions and auxiliary machines, allowing different evaluation harnesses to reuse the same task definition. The February 2024 introduction explains this portability goal; the repository supplies templates and adapters. A shared format does not itself enforce containment or validate the grader, and the standard deliberately leaves agent safety and oversight outside its scope.