# Model Card

> Maintain a versioned structured document covering intended use, known limitations, eval results, and risks — the single source of truth for every stakeholder asking "what does this agent actually do?"

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Governance & Observability
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/model_card/

---

## Description
**Intent**: Maintain a structured document describing the model/agent's intended use, limitations, evaluation results, and risks.
**Context**: Legal teams reviewing deployment, compliance officers prepping for a regulator visit, customers reading documentation, and new engineers onboarding all need to understand what the agent actually does. Without a model card, that knowledge lives in Slack threads, tribal memory, and one engineer's mental model.
**Solution**: Maintain a markdown document at a known location with sections: intended use, out-of-scope use, training/data lineage, evaluation results, limitations, risks, and contact. Version it alongside the agent — card updates ship with agent changes.



## Use Cases
- Multiple stakeholders need a shared understanding of agent capabilities and limits.
- Intended use, out-of-scope use, and known risks are stable enough to document.
- Evaluation results exist or can be produced periodically.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Stakeholder alignment — everyone works from the same document.

- Regulatory and audit defensibility — you have a dated, versioned record of what you claimed the agent could do.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Maintenance burden — the card must be kept current to stay useful.

- Card drift when not enforced in PR reviews — it quietly becomes stale.







---
**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/model-card/)