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Open documents inviting external review and collaboration
The Sovereignty Foundation publishes its standards work as Working Drafts — open for review, critique, implementation, and collaborative refinement. The drafts are substantive but explicitly not finished. The Foundation invites the broader community to shape them.
Each standard uses a tier-based maturity framework to honestly distinguish requirements that are evidence-backed and ready for stable adoption (CORE / MUST) from those that are proposed and require validation (PROPOSED / SHOULD) and those that are forward-looking and exploratory (FORWARD-LOOKING / MAY). This framework is borrowed from the IETF and W3C tradition where standards are developed through public iteration rather than asserted unilaterally.
On the Word “Standard”
“Standard” here means “specification developed through open process” — not “industry-ratified obligation.” Working Drafts at this stage have no regulatory force. They acquire force through external review, independent implementation, and eventual ratification by a recognized standards-development body (or through becoming a de facto reference, which depends on the same external engagement).
Artificial Governed Intelligence · 11 Normative Requirements
Normative requirements for AI systems whose governance properties can be cryptographically verified. Eleven requirements organized in three maturity tiers. Maps to EU AI Act high-risk obligations and NIST AISI articulated assurance gaps. 18-month timeline to ratification.
Deterministic Wire Format · Three-Tier Conformance
A bounded, deterministic wire format for high-assurance distributed AI. Three conformance tiers (Compliant / Certified / Certified+) anchored on cryptographic verification rather than self-attestation. Empirical performance characterization included.
Forthcoming
Lexicon Substrate Standard · stewardship mechanism for standards bodies
Knox Warrant Specification · cryptographic authorization primitives
Each requirement in each Working Draft is tagged with a maturity tier. The tiers serve different functions:
CORE / MUST — requirements that are evidence-backed by working implementations and stable across the substrate. These are the requirements an implementation must satisfy to claim conformance to the standard at the current draft level.
PROPOSED / SHOULD — requirements that are technically well-defined but require external validation before promotion to CORE. Implementations are encouraged but not required to satisfy these.
FORWARD-LOOKING / MAY — requirements that are exploratory or speculative. Included to mark the direction of likely future development. Implementations may experiment with these; the Foundation does not yet commit to them.
This tier structure exists because pretending speculative work is finished is a category of dishonesty that contaminates the entire standard. The tiers let readers — and reviewers, and implementers, and regulators — see what's solid and what's exploratory at a glance.
External engagement channels for the standards work are not yet open. The Foundation is at the formative operational stage; engagement channels for technical review, implementation feedback, and Working Group participation will activate once legal counsel is engaged and triage infrastructure is in place.
The Working Drafts may be read and examined independently in the meantime. The Foundation's only currently-open inbound channel is from law firms responding to the Seeking Representation ask. The Foundation will publish an update at the disclosure log when standards-engagement channels become active.
Authority of the standards comes from external engagement, not from Foundation assertion. The Foundation is staging engagement carefully so that authority can accrue through substantive participation rather than premature openness.
Authority of the standards comes from external engagement, not from Foundation assertion.
Working Drafts Published 2026 · CC-BY-4.0 · Implementations Welcome
