Overview

Tools are how an agent acts on the world: running shell commands, reading files, calling APIs. Each tool exposes itself to the LLM as a JSON Schema, and the agent invokes it through a unified streaming interface. AgentScope organizes tool-related building blocks under three concepts:

Concept	Role
Tool	Any class that satisfies the `ToolBase` interface, including the built-ins shipped with AgentScope and the `FunctionTool` / `MCPTool` adapters that wrap plain functions or MCP-server tools
Toolkit	The container that registers tools, MCP clients, and skills, exposes their JSON schemas to the model, and dispatches each tool call to the right tool object
Tool Group	A named bundle of tools, MCP clients, and skills that can be activated or deactivated as a unit; the agent toggles groups at runtime via the built-in meta tool

A minimal Toolkit takes a list of tool instances:

from agentscope.tool import Toolkit, Bash, Read, Write, Edit

toolkit = Toolkit(
    tools=[Bash(), Read(), Write(), Edit()],
)

A Toolkit created with tools alone exposes those tools in the special "basic" group, which is always active. Adding mcps, skills_or_loaders, or extra tool_groups extends what the agent can reach.

Next Steps

Each capability source has its own page:

Python Tool

Built-in tools, custom tools, function wrapping, and tool middleware.

MCP

Connect MCP servers and use their tools.

Skill

Extend agent capabilities with markdown instruction sets.

Meta Tool

Let the agent activate and deactivate tool groups at runtime.

Agent

How agents orchestrate tool calls in the ReAct loop.

Permission System

Fine-grained control over which tools can execute and when.

Offload Context Python Tool

Get Started

Building Blocks

Agent as Service

Others

Next Steps

Python Tool

MCP

Skill

Meta Tool

Further Reading

Agent

Permission System

​Next Steps

Python Tool

MCP

Skill

Meta Tool

​Further Reading

Agent

Permission System

Next Steps

Further Reading