diff --git a/.agents/skills/lib.sh b/.agents/skills/lib.sh
index 775147e..7217137 100644
--- a/.agents/skills/lib.sh
+++ b/.agents/skills/lib.sh
@@ -37,15 +37,25 @@ AGENT_SESSIONS_YAML="${AGENT_SESSIONS_YAML:-$WORKSPACE_ROOT/.mam/agent-sessions.
 # (Issue #71). The herdr shim gets this same definition: _init_herdr_isolation
 # writes it in with `declare -f`. A long name needs its SHA-1 suffix; with no
 # shasum, sha1sum, openssl or python3 to make it, this fails (stderr, nonzero)
-# rather than return a name herdr never registered.
+# rather than return a name herdr never registered. A name that is not ASCII
+# is lowercased and replaced by python3 (tr/sed differ from str.lower() there),
+# and fails the same way without it.
 _sanitize_herdr_agent_name() {
   local n="$1"
   if [ -z "$n" ]; then
     printf 'agent\n'
     return 0
   fi
-  local s
-  s=$(echo "$n" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sed -E 's/[^a-z0-9_-]/-/g')
+  local s=""
+  if [ -z "$(printf '%s' "$n" | LC_ALL=C tr -d '\000-\177')" ]; then
+    s=$(printf '%s' "$n" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | sed -E 's/[^a-z0-9_-]/-/g')
+  elif command -v python3 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+    s=$(python3 -c 'import re,sys; sys.stdout.write(re.sub(r"[^a-z0-9_-]", "-", sys.argv[1].lower()))' "$n") || s=""
+  fi
+  if [ -z "$s" ]; then
+    echo "ERROR: cannot make the herdr name of '$n': it is not ASCII and there is no python3 to convert it" >&2
+    return 1
+  fi
   if [[ ! "$s" =~ ^[a-z] ]]; then s="x-$s"; fi
   if [ "${#s}" -gt 32 ]; then
     local h=""