======================================================================== The Framework for Agent Conformance & Trust F-ACT 1.0 — Priority Edition ======================================================================== Category: Agent Sovereignty Framework: GUARD (Grant · Usage · Audit · Revocation · Data) Published: 19 August 2026 · World Humanitarian Day (2026-08-19) Canonical: https://f-act.org/standard Steward: Open Conformance Foundation (neutral steward, being established); published by Society OS Pty Ltd as current owner. LICENCE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This specification text is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: "The Framework for Agent Conformance & Trust (F-ACT) 1.0" by Society OS, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The core claims of the specification are separately covered by an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide patent non-assertion pledge. Copyright (the text) and patents (the claims) are two distinct rights, both settled in the adopter’s favour. https://openconformance.org/occ/pledge ======================================================================== DEFINING PRINCIPLE ======================================================================== Govern before execution — not after. A standard for agent governance must require that policy is enforced at the moment of action — checked before an agent acts, and able to stop the action if the answer is no. Watching an agent and raising an alert after the fact is not governance; it is a record of what already went wrong. F-ACT is built on prevention: the answer to “is this allowed?” is decided before the consequence exists, not explained after it. ======================================================================== THE FIVE DIMENSIONS (GUARD) ======================================================================== 1. GRANT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: Who granted this agent its authority, and can that grant be traced to an accountable human? Requirement: Every agent must carry authority that resolves to a named human principal. An agent that cannot trace its grant of authority to a named human is out of conformance by definition. Rationale: Accountability cannot exist without a person at the end of the chain. Autonomy without a traceable principal is exactly the risk regulators are moving to close. 2. USAGE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: What is this agent permitted to do — and what is explicitly out of bounds? Requirement: Permitted actions must be declared in advance. Anything outside declared usage is denied by default, not allowed by omission. Rationale: Open-ended agents fail open. A standard has to make the boundary explicit and make the default deny, so a gap in the rules is never a licence to act. 3. AUDIT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: Is every consequential action recorded in a form that survives a dispute? Requirement: Consequential actions must produce a tamper-evident record — one that can be shown to be unaltered, not merely a log that can be edited later. Rationale: An audit trail only matters if it holds up when challenged. A record that can be quietly changed proves nothing when it counts. 4. REVOCATION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: Can its authority be withdrawn instantly — and proven withdrawn? Requirement: Authority must be revocable in real time, and the revocation must be verifiable by a third party. A credential that cannot be cleanly killed is not governed. Rationale: The moment you cannot stop an agent is the moment you no longer govern it. Revocation is the difference between control and hope. 5. DATA ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Question: What data may it touch, on what basis, and where may that data go? Requirement: Every data touch must have a lawful basis and a permitted destination. Data leaving its allowed boundary is a conformance failure. Rationale: Most agent harm is a data event — the wrong information reaching the wrong place. Governing the data path is inseparable from governing the agent. ======================================================================== CONFORMANCE LEVELS ======================================================================== L0 — Unattested ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The agent answers none of the five questions. Its authority, scope and data path are unknown. Criteria: No governance envelope. The default state of most deployed agents today. L1 — Declared ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The agent can answer all five questions. Its governance is documented and inspectable. Criteria: A complete, readable answer to Grant, Usage, Audit, Revocation and Data exists. L2 — Enforced ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The answers are binding. Actions outside policy are stopped before they execute — not merely flagged after. Criteria: Policy is checked at the moment of action, and a “no” prevents the action. L3 — Provable ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enforcement leaves tamper-evident, admissible evidence, and authority can be revoked and proven revoked in real time. Criteria: Every enforced decision is independently verifiable, and revocation is instant and provable. ======================================================================== GOVERNANCE ======================================================================== Open by design — conformance is earned, not granted F-ACT is an open standard. Conformance is defined by capability, not permission: any implementation — any vendor, any language, any stack — that meets a tier’s published criteria conforms to that tier. No product, membership, or sign-off from the steward is required to reach any tier, and none can be withheld. * Capability, not permission A tier is reached by meeting its published criteria in a way an independent third party can check — never by approval from the steward. If you can prove it, you conform. * The steward is not a gatekeeper Society OS maintains the specification and its versions; it does not decide who may implement it. Its own products are measured against the same tiers, on the same evidence, as anyone else’s. * Free to read, cite, implement and require The standard is published to be used — in policy, in procurement, in vendor questionnaires, and in competing products. A standard only one company can meet is not a standard; this one is written to be met widely. ======================================================================== PATENT PLEDGE (SUMMARY) ======================================================================== Patent Non-Assertion Pledge — Version 1.0 Entity: Society OS Pty Ltd Anyone may use, implement, build on, or require the core claims of F-ACT — including GUARD 3 · Provable — without a licence and without asking, for any purpose and by any method. Conformance is one use among many, not a condition. The core claims of F-ACT are pledged never to be asserted against anyone. The pledge covers any use — including, but not limited to, conformance. It is irrevocable, royalty-free and worldwide. The claims are being placed with a neutral Swiss foundation so no company can ever take them back. Full text: https://openconformance.org/occ/pledge ======================================================================== Formats: HTML https://f-act.org/standard | JSON https://f-act.org/standard/spec.json Version history: https://f-act.org/f-act/changelog Contact: https://f-act.org/f-act/contact ========================================================================