The open standard for governing autonomous AI agents.
F-ACT™ — the The Framework for Agent Conformance & Trust — names the five questions every agent must answer, grades the answers across four conformance tiers, and rests on one principle: govern before execution, not after.
F-ACT: Foundation, Foresight, Function, Fiduciary — before the agent ACTs.
It is published, versioned, free to cite, free to implement, and pledged never to be asserted against anyone who uses it. The core claims are being placed with a neutral Swiss foundation so no single company can ever hold a veto over the rules.
Published on World Humanitarian Day (19 August 2026) — a deliberate choice. A standard for governing autonomous agents belongs to the public interest, and its launch date should say so. The same day the United Nations marks the commitment to reach people in crisis, F-ACT marks a commitment that the agents acting on our behalf must be accountable to the people they affect.
Free to read, free to cite, free to implement. No licence, no registration, no permission required.
Where this came from: read the founding statement of 18 December 2025 — and what has happened since.
The dates we chose
Three anniversaries, held on purpose
The milestones of this work were timed to fall on dates that already mean something. Not a claim of equivalence — a discipline. Each anniversary is a reminder of who the work is meant to serve.
1 February 1865 — President Lincoln signs the joint resolution proposing the Thirteenth Amendment. The United States now marks the date as National Freedom Day.
1 February 2026 (UTC) — the provisional omnibus (504 claims, provisional and unexamined) is filed.
18 December 1865 — the Thirteenth Amendment is ratified, abolishing slavery in the United States.
18 December 2025 — the founding statement is published.
19 August — the United Nations marks the commitment to reach people in crisis, everywhere.
19 August 2026 — F-ACT 1.0 is published, open and royalty-free.
On the filing: the provisional application is a single moment in time. In Coordinated Universal Time it falls on 1 February 2026 (National Freedom Day); on the IP Australia register it is recorded at its Brisbane local time, 2 February 2026 (AEST) — the same instant, one clock ahead. The historical parallels are commemorative resonance, not a claim of legal or moral equivalence.
GUARD™ · Grant · Usage · Audit · Revocation · Data
The five questions
An agent that cannot answer these is not governed — however well it is monitored. F-ACT makes each question a normative clause with an observable, checkable outcome.
Grant
Who granted this agent its authority, and can that grant be traced to an accountable human?
Usage
What is this agent permitted to do — and what is explicitly out of bounds?
Audit
What record survives, and would it hold up in a dispute?
Revocation
Can its authority be withdrawn instantly — and can the withdrawal be proven?
Data
What may it touch, where may that data go, and under whose jurisdiction?
Four conformance tiers
Self-assessed or independently verified — never granted or withheld by any single company.No governance envelope. The default state of most deployed agents today.
A complete, readable answer to Grant, Usage, Audit, Revocation and Data exists.
Policy is checked at the moment of action, and a “no” prevents the action.
Every enforced decision is independently verifiable, and revocation is instant and provable.
The context
Why a standard, and why now
Autonomous agents are moving into production faster than the means to govern them. Standards bodies, regulators and the courts are converging on the same small set of questions — who authorised it, what it may do, what it touched, what record survives, and whether it can be stopped. F-ACT gives organisations one open, checkable way to state and verify those answers.
Gartner projects that task-specific AI agents will feature in 40% of enterprise applications by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025.
Gartner · press release, August 2025NIST opened an AI Agent Standards Initiative to close the “identity gap” — least-privilege authorisation, agent-to-agent delegation and tamper-evident logging — because controls built for static software do not fit autonomous agents.
NIST · AI Agent Standards InitiativeUnder Article 73 of the EU AI Act, providers of high-risk AI must report serious incidents to regulators from 2 August 2026 — oversight, logging and accountability move from good practice to legal duty.
European Union · AI Act, Article 73For the fuller record — the incidents, rulings and standards before and since the founding statement — read The Catalyst.
Put it to work
A standard earns adoption when implementing it is easier than rolling your own. F-ACT is not static prose — it ships with a browser checker, a step-by-step adoption guide, and machine-readable artefacts you can validate against today.
Prove it in your browser
Paste or upload an agent governance envelope and get an instant, clause-by-clause conformance verdict across all four tiers — no install, no sign-up. Build one from scratch with the guided wizard.
Open the checkerA step-by-step adoption guide
The practical path from reading the specification to a published, verifiable conformance claim — including how F-ACT maps onto the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001 you may already run.
Read the adoption guideMachine-readable & testable
A published JSON Schema, example envelopes, a standalone validator and a suite of canonical test vectors — so agents and pipelines can check conformance automatically, not just assert it.
See the test vectorsWhy you can build on this
A standard is only worth adopting if nobody can pull it out from under you later. Three commitments make that concrete.
Patent non-assertion pledge
The core claims of F-ACT are pledged never to be asserted against anyone, for any use. Irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide — and binding on every successor and assign.
Read the pledgePublic attestation registry
Organisations self-declare their conformance tier in public, and each entry can carry a verifiable mark. Claims are checkable, not merely asserted.
Open the registryFounding coalition
F-ACT is forming a multi-stakeholder coalition modelled on W3C, IETF and the Linux Foundation, so the standard is governed by more than one company. The founding cohort closes at 42.
Become a founding signatoryThe core claims are intended to be held by a neutral Swiss foundation.
The Open Conformance Foundation is being established for a single purpose: to hold the core claims of the open standards so that no single company — including Society OS — can ever hold a veto over the rules. The Foundation does not yet exist as a legal entity, and the transfer has not yet completed. Until it does, Society OS Pty Ltd makes the patent pledge as current owner, and that pledge binds every successor and assign, so the guarantee holds continuously across the transfer.
Once established, the Foundation will license the core claims back to Society OS Pty Ltd on a non-exclusive basis — the identical terms available to anyone else. No exclusive lock, no special deal.
Read the stewardship and IP-transfer storyF-ACT governs one agent. T-RUE governs the chain between agents.
Where F-ACT settles whether a single agent’s authority is accountable and provable, T-RUE — Transitive Revocation of Upstream Endorsements — extends that revocation across chains of agents, so a trust withdrawn upstream falls everywhere downstream. Two sides of the same coin, developed under the same royalty-free pledge. T-RUE 1.0 was published on 5 September 2026.
Explore T-RUE
Meet OCCY
Eight arms, each cradling a node of governance. OCCY is the face of the Open Conformance Coalition — the vendor-neutral body that stewards F-ACT alongside its sibling standards. Conformance is a web, not a monolith; holding it together takes reach, not force.
Meet the Coalition