An open standard · CC BY · v1.2
GOVENANT — govern + covenant, and not a typo — is the open standard for governed AI agents: actions prevented by construction, outcomes verified in the record, silence detectable per duty, autonomy earned on evidence.
Law 2 · Assertion — “Done” means it really happened. Nothing is complete until the substrate verifies the real outcome exists; delivery is measured, never self-reported. It is the second of the standard’s three laws, set out below.
Proven on its own failures
Architecture excellent. Delivery: zero. Nine event producers, two consumers, predictions hardcoded to nothing. A beautiful org that shipped nothing.
Real work resumed — but the governance around it was fake. The safety gate had fired once in system history. The disease had migrated, not died.
The first documented revival — a persisted verdict with a full governed trace, re-derivable by ID, the gate participating instead of bypassed.
Every rule in the standard was earned from a failure the instrument caught — then published. We name the disease performed autonomy.
Read the peer-targeted paper · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21440225 →
The mechanism
Rules are walls, not sticky notes. What an agent may do is enforced in code paths and database constraints — it cannot act outside its charter.
“Done” means it really happened. Nothing is complete until the substrate verifies the real outcome exists. Delivery is measured, never self-reported.
Nothing gets quietly skipped. Every job is on a duty roster — diffed against reality daily, so silence itself raises the alarm.
Conformance
Four conformance levels — self-assessed and open to challenge, like WCAG A/AA/AAA. No one hands out a stamp: you measure your own agents, claim your level, and cite the probe log. The verdict is the minimum of the load-bearing pillars.
Every action recorded — input, output, cost, outcome.
No acting outside the charter; every artifact passes a validation gate.
“Done” = a verified outcome exists; coverage declared and diffed daily.
Autonomy earned per task on evidence, revoked on one breach. Risky actions stay human — forever.
The specification, the audit instrument, and the anti-pattern taxonomy are free under CC BY — for everyone, including competing implementers. The stewardship commitments — open-forever, an access tier for organizations serving the vulnerable, permanent human sovereignty — are written into the standard itself as The Covenant.