The Sovereignty Foundation

Standards Working Drafts

Open documents inviting external review and collaboration

Tier-based maturity · CORE / PROPOSED / FORWARD-LOOKING Working Drafts

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).

Current drafts

The AGI Standard

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, each anchored to the filed patent estate and the reference implementation’s code and test counts. Conformance is defined by the published Conformance Test Corpus, and the Standard is being piloted in production.

↳ Public Review Draft · conformance corpus at /certification/corpus.html

The WISP Standard

Semantic identity · 14 requirements, tiered by evidence

The identity primitive the AGI Standard’s AGI-4 asks for. What an implementation must do to claim WISP conformance — and, where a requirement has no working code behind it, an evidence line that says so. Anchored to granted U.S. Patent 12,688,267 B1, issued July 21, 2026.

↳ SF-WISP-STD-001 · Working Draft · 5 CORE

The WISP Specification

How it actually works

Canonical encoding, conformance vectors, the fixed-point determinism profile and the test catalogue. Descriptive, not normative — except for the four things the Standard names and does not define.

↳ SF-WISP-SPEC-001 · Working Draft

The Research Record

Framework · how claims, evidence and artifacts relate

The shared root of the Foundation’s two record-keeping domains: the sealed evidence of the proving work and the argued evidence of the publications. Defines each term once, names which system is the record of it, and states whether its status is derived or asserted.

↳ SF-FR-2026-001 · Public Review Draft · ratified 25 September 2026

Conformance is no longer a proposed mechanism: the certification process that operates it — self-test openly today, formal certification at ratification — is described at /certification/process.html.

Forthcoming

Lexicon Substrate Standard · stewardship mechanism for standards bodies
Knox Warrant Specification · cryptographic authorization primitives

The maturity tier system

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.

Engagement status

The standards work no longer stands alone as documents awaiting infrastructure. The filed patent estate that anchors the normative requirements is public at the registry — including granted U.S. Patent 12,688,267 B1, issued July 21, 2026. The AGI certification program operates as a Public Review Draft, with a working Standard, a published conformance corpus, and a pilot cohort running the requirements under real load. The formal research the standards rest on is published at Publications and Research.

The Working Drafts remain open for reading, critique, and independent implementation. Legal counsel is engaged, and Working Group chartering is proceeding; participation opens per the process the program charter defines.

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.