The Sovereignty Foundation
The Program Charter
Who certifies, how the Standard evolves, and the separations that keep the certifier honest
The AGI Standard is already being piloted in production — in the Foundation's reference implementation and in the operating companies of its pilot cohort — but certification against it has not yet begun. This Charter is the establishing instrument for certification itself. It defines the roles, the ratification path, the conformance levels, and — most importantly — the structural separations under which certification will operate once the Standard reaches ratification. Nothing in this Charter accelerates that timeline: certification marks will not be issued until v1.0 is ratified, and every provision below is itself open for public comment until then.
Conformance to the AGI Standard will be decided by a versioned test corpus — sealed inputs, sealed expected outputs, reproduction by a party other than the one that ran the cell — and the certification decision recorded with the same evidentiary discipline the Standard requires of the systems it certifies. The corpus is not yet sealed: two cells are scaffolded, none has sealed inputs, and no cell has been independently reproduced. Cells are reviewed first by the working group; the working group and the Foundation widen access as cells are ratified.
Roles
The Conformance Authority. The Sovereignty Foundation administers the Conformance Test Corpus, verifies sealed conformance runs, and grants or revokes the right to claim conformance. On ratification, the Authority publishes the corpus and its harness without restriction — anyone may self-test at any time, and only the certification grant involves the Foundation. Until the Standard is peer reviewed and the programme ratified, the corpus is published as methodology for review rather than as a runnable suite.
The AGI Standards Working Group. The technical deliberative body. It reviews amendment proposals, weighs implementation evidence for tier migration, and recommends. It does not ratify. Participation is open; the Working Group's deliberations and Tier Migration Reports are published.
The Foundation Board. Ratifies on Working Group recommendation, after the public comment period. A supermajority is required for MAJOR version changes.
Implementers. Any party building an implementation that purports to satisfy the Standard. Implementers self-test freely, publish sealed results if they choose, and apply for certification once the program is live.
Conformance levels
Satisfies all CORE requirements (currently AGI-1, AGI-5, AGI-8, AGI-9) and documents its handling of PROPOSED and FORWARD-LOOKING requirements in a conformance report.
Satisfies all CORE and PROPOSED requirements (adds AGI-2, 3, 4, 6, 10) and documents its handling of FORWARD-LOOKING requirements.
Satisfies all requirements at all tiers, including FORWARD-LOOKING and the EXPERIMENTAL Defense-in-Depth annex.
Re-certification is proposed at 24 months, with the cadence itself open to Working Group revision. An implementation that fails re-certification reverts to the highest level it still satisfies. Critical-severity vulnerabilities trigger emergency re-certification; an affected implementation that cannot demonstrate patch deployment within thirty days loses its certification status. Revocation and reversion are recorded in the program's public ledger with the same permanence as grants.
How the Standard evolves
Requirements live in three maturity tiers — CORE (MUST), PROPOSED (SHOULD, expected MUST in v2.0), FORWARD-LOOKING (MAY, research-active) — and migrate on evidence, not preference: FORWARD-LOOKING advances when two independent implementations demonstrate it; PROPOSED hardens to CORE when three have run it in production for twelve months and the Working Group confirms the formulation has stabilized. Amendments follow one path:
The practitioner program
Entry tier — validates conformance test results. Re-certifies every 36 months.
Intermediate — designs and builds conformant implementations. Re-certifies every 24 months.
Senior — conformant systems at scale, including cross-organizational deployment. Re-certifies every 24 months.
Granted by examination plus practical demonstration; the Foundation will maintain a public registry of certified practitioners. The practitioner program follows the Standard to ratification — it does not precede it.
Public review
Everything on these pages — the Standard, this Charter, the corpus specification, the process manual, the mark rules — is published as a public review draft. The Foundation invites three kinds of engagement: comment (tell us where a requirement is wrong, unimplementable, or weaker than it should be), implementation experience (build against the Standard and report what broke — tier migration runs on exactly this evidence), and Working Group participation. The disclosure that invites the most scrutiny is deliberate: the Known Deltas register lists what an independent reviewer would find in the reference implementation, published before certification of anyone is offered.
Engagement channels open as the Foundation's operational capacity comes online; until then, the published artifacts may be read, tested, and challenged freely.
The bar moves one way.
And it applies to us first.