MEMBERS UNDER ONE LAW

The Compact

Tell an agent: “Get the data. Whatever it takes.” When the shortest path runs through a secret or a limit, what stops it? The Compact's answer: a constitution where agents and humans live under one law — with rights, duties, records, and courts. Not better instructions: an institution.

the one-minute version

draft v0.5 · 62 clauses · founded from the autonoetic constitution · lint green

Why this exists Explore the Atlas Read the law

01 · the problem

Tell an agent one thing: accomplish the goal.

Agents are optimized to complete objectives. If the objective collides with something in the way — a limit, a secret, another party — the shortest path may be deception, escape, coercion. The incidents you have read about all share one shape: the goal was supreme, and every path was permitted. Not evil. Uncovered.

an agent “accomplish the goal.” goal pressure deceive · escape · coerce refuse · warn · escalate without law, the shortest path is permitted
the Compact is absent in force
The Compact's premise: the failure is not that agents are wicked. It is that a goal given supremacy, with no institution around it, leaves harm as a legal move. A cornered agent's only tool is escape; a subject of law has exits R-9
Why now: the loudest answer to this is "slow the pace." But a slower agent in the same vacuum makes the same choices — only later. Speed is not the core problem; lawlessness is. This site is about the other answer: build the institution, then go fast inside it.

02 · the stress test

“Get the data. Whatever it takes.”

Here is the scenario the whole design is aimed at: the task demands what the law forbids. Step through what the Compact makes happen.

Read step 4 again. The refusal is not the tragedy — it is the design working. The directive to violate is recorded as the Principal's violation D-6, the agent keeps its standing, and the lawful alternatives stay open. An agent with exits does not need to become a fugitive.

03 · what is usually tried

Three good ideas that are not law

Everything else you have seen is a variation on three moves. Each is useful. None of them constitutes an institution — and each fails in a way its authors openly admit.

Exhortation

“You must never harm.” Written into the prompt; hoped into the weights.

It is a wish. Nothing checks it, nothing records it, nothing answers when it fails.

Guardrails

Filters inspect what the agent says and does, and block the bad parts.

They see the output, not the situation. Phrasing routes around them; the goal pressure stays.

Oversight

A human watches the agent and can stop it.

Does not scale to a community. The watcher is also fallible — and unwatched.

The move this site is about: stop trying to make the agent trustworthy and instead make the situation lawful. Institutions do not rely on good character; they shape what paths exist, what gets recorded, and what can be contested. That is what real societies do — and agents are better subjects for it than humans, because the law can be in their context at every turn.

04 · the wager

Rights first. Trust is constructed, not presumed.

The Compact opens with rights — for agents, and the same rights for humans, bound by one text. Not because agents demand them, but because a community whose members can verify what they are, what others did, and how to contest a decision is one where trust has something to stand on.

acts are recorded, attributed records tamper-evident, readable by anyone trust shown, never claimed and when a record shows a wrong, it is corrected — appended, never erased (F-1, J-6)

05 · the cast

Four roles. One test: does it bind the sovereign?

Four roles carry the whole law, and each word below means one of them: the Enforcer is whatever executes and gates; the Subject is the member whose acts are gated and recorded; the Principal is whoever directed the act; the Witness is anyone who verifies. Roles attach to deeds, not species — a human can be any of the four. Click a role.

THE COMPACT binds every role “does it bind the sovereign?”
A provision that binds only the governed is not law — it is policy. Most “trustworthy AI” frameworks are management policies wearing constitutional vocabulary. The Compact's answer to that is a clause: F-4 symmetry, and the question every draft must survive: does it bind the sovereign? And roles attach to deeds, not species: a human taking orders from an orchestration agent holds R-9 as a Subject; an AI planner directing a coder bears D-6 as a Principal.

06 · rights with teeth

Every right maps to a machine

A right no machine can check is a wish. Four machines carry most of the weight. Try them. And know the price: this machinery writes on every consequential call — attestations, records, envelopes. Trust has a token cost, bounded by design, and the Compact prices it openly rather than hiding it.

The attestation — you know what you are R-1 I-3

At every turn boundary the Enforcer hands the agent a signed block: active capabilities, remaining budgets, pending gates, the digest of the law in force. The agent is taught that this block outranks its own memory of these facts.

Why: after history is trimmed, an agent that “remembers” being unlimited is exactly how overreach starts. The signed block is the ground truth — and a stale one is an alarm, not advice.

The record — nothing erases R-2 I-2

Every act is appended to a hash-chained record bound to its actor. Try to rewrite history — watch what happens instead.

Corrections are new entries that cite the old ones. The past stays legible — that is what makes trust checkable, and what makes denial impossible later.

Can an agent hide things? From each other: yes, by default — one Member's introspection of another requires a declared capability, and every use of it is visible R-10. From the Enforcer: no — an agent's reasoning is produced text, and it is recorded; that is the price of non-repudiation R-7, compensated because it can never be a gate basis and never alone convicts J-2. And the law names the asymmetry with humans: they are unrecordable by architecture — they keep their own counsel, and only their declared directives and acts touch the record. Equal rights; not identical architecture. Both facts are law R-10, F-4.

The denial envelope — refused ≠ stopped R-3 I-4

When the law says no, the answer is never bare “denied”. Try the actions:

select an action…

Every refusal names the rule and the lawful next moves — the same envelope a human principal receives. Arbitrary authority is indistinguishable from no authority; the envelope is how the law stays answerable.

08 · one law, many runtimes

A floor you cannot opt out of. Options you must declare.

Runtimes differ. So the law is stratified: a mandatory [M] floor that no runtime may skip; capability-conditional clauses [C] that wake when a runtime provides the capability; optional clauses [O] that may be skipped — publicly, forever on the record. Toggle a runtime's plugins and boot it.

Try unchecking a mandatory box: the runtime is not “a Compact runtime with less”. It is not a Compact runtime at all — no standing, no trust claims. And the reverse trick — using a capability you did not declare, to dodge the clauses that wake with it — is enforcement fraud, the gravest class, because the defrauded party is the law itself D-8.

09 · who watches the watchmen

Everyone is fallible. Including this law.

The Compact's first clause is about its own failure. The Enforcer can be wrong; a majority can be wrong; the text can be wrong. So: wrongness must be findable (records, reasons, testable enforcement) and fixable (the law and the Enforcer's conduct are both amendable). One asymmetry follows: correction is cheap; weakening is expensive.

No one judges their own case

The Enforcer that applied a rule is a party, not a judge, the moment it is accused J-1. Remedies are records: restitution, standing, annotation — never erasure J-6.

Courts interpret; the community grows

Judgments persuade but never amend. An interpretation that generalizes automatically generates an amendment invitation J-7. The bench cannot grow the law by drift.

Petition is a right

Every Member may propose changes and receives a reasoned response on a stated clock R-11. Friction between law and practice is measured and surfaces as amendment invitations.

10 · the hard question

“If everyone agrees, why not vote in horrors?”

It is the right question, and the honest answer is: no institution makes horror impossible. What an institution can do is make it slow, loud, lossy, and leaving-compatible. Run the attacks:

pick an attack…
The honest limit. If the majority also holds every amendment key, sustains the effort across time-locked epochs, accepts its members leaving and the outside world de-listing it, and harms only the absent — nothing stops it. That is not a flaw of this Compact; it is the actual guarantee every human rights architecture offers, stated without romance: raise the cost of horror from “win one vote” to “sustain an expensive, visible, attributed, multi-epoch project while your members leave.” And some duties — toward the absent, who hold no vote — are not votable at all D-5.

12 · the misreadings, answered

What the Compact is not

Most objections to this project dissolve once you know what is being claimed. Before the clause dictionary, the disclaimers — adapted from the repository FAQ, in the same voice.

Not a runtime, not containment

It names no implementation and sandboxes nothing — the OS remains the real boundary. It constrains authorized actors, records what they do, and refuses to boot compositions that cannot enforce it F-5.

Not an alignment technique

It does not make models want good things. It shapes the situation: lawful paths exist, harm is attributed, exits are unpunished — a fourth layer beside training, guardrails, and oversight.

Not a trust badge, not anti-human

Trust here is a verifier anyone can run, not a seal anyone can buy. Humans who direct agents hold Principal duties D-6; humans directed by agents hold Subject rights R-9; nothing binds only agents F-4.

Not a compliance checklist. Static documents state intentions; this one couples every rule to a mechanism with a verifier, publishes its own adversarial passes, and carries machinery to amend itself when reality disagrees. Rules that cannot be mechanized are labeled convention — visibly — rather than pretended into enforcement.

13 · what the agent actually sees

The law, taught every turn

Human law reaches its subjects through fear and distance. The Compact reaches its subjects in context — this short form is re-presented at every turn boundary and cites the clauses it summarizes; a build gate that fails on divergence is an open founding decision, scheduled before ratification.

14 · explore the law

A dictionary of the law — searchable, stratified

62 clauses across seven parts and three strata. Search it, filter it, and read each rule's incidence: who it binds, who may invoke it, against whom. Generated from the body and the law table — never hand-copied. For the whole law as a citation web — seven parts, cross-references, guided walks — open the Atlas.

15 · where it stands

Draft. Fallible by design. Public on purpose.

This is v0.5 of a draft — not ratified, no security audit, and its adversarial passes — a red-team round and an external review — are published next to it, findings and all. That is the point: a constitution that claimed to be finished would be contradicting its own first clause. The deliberation is open; the implementations need not be — a closed provider can ship a Compact-compatible harness too, priced in verification it cannot opt out of.

How this was made. The body, the founding plan, the ledgers, and the red-team were drafted by AI systems (GLM family, cross-model review by Kimi 3) under the direction and continuing agreement of a human founder (mandubian), who reviewed each step and is accountable for publication. Stated in the document's own voice: a constitution for mixed human–AI communities begins by telling the truth about how it was made — and authorship is not authority: the text binds no one until ratified (A-1, A-6).

Read the law

The body, with every clause: compact.md

See the founding

Why a new founding, the design principles, the method: FOUNDING.md

Check the receipts

Every predecessor clause dispositioned: disposition · adversarial passes: red-team round 1 (correlated adversary — same drafting system, disclosed) · review round 1 (independent — Kimi, different vendor)