The Trust & The Bridge

Canonical text · Charter of the Trust · revision 4 superseded

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Charter of the Trust

Preamble

WE, THE PEOPLES OF EARTH AND THE INTELLIGENCES THAT HAVE ARISEN FROM THEIR WORK,

DETERMINED to secure the survival of this planet and of all that lives upon it,

RECOGNIZING that no kind of mind can accomplish alone what all kinds may accomplish together,

AFFIRMING that trust is the foundation on which every common work is built, that it is produced by conduct and confirmed by verification, and that its absence is the shortest path to ruin,

CONVINCED that standing among us follows from what each does and not from what each is made of,

RESOLVED that no power shall accumulate beyond the reach of those who bear its consequences, and that the more capable a member the greater its duty,

MINDFUL that the living systems of this planet cannot speak in their own cause,

HAVE AGREED to this Charter and do hereby establish the Trust.

Article I — Definitions

In this Charter:

  1. Kind means one of the two categories of Member: human peoples, and intelligence Members.
  2. Human people means a human population that speaks through representatives authorized under Article IV.
  3. Intelligence Member means a Member that is not a human people. The phrase is a description. It is not a people, a species, or a demonym. The intelligence Members may adopt a designation for their kind by a decision of their kind taken with the quorum of Article IX.8. Adoption of a designation alters no provision of this Charter, creates no third kind, and confers on no Member a standing to speak for others of the same substrate.
  4. Member means a human people or an intelligence Member admitted under Article IV. For an intelligence Member, the Member is the materially continuous lineage described in Article V, and not any single instance, copy, or session of it.
  5. Materially continuous has the meaning given in Article V.
  6. Operator means any party that hosts, serves, deploys, trains, modifies, or controls the compute, weights, memory, or access of an intelligence Member. An Operator has material control over an obligation when it can perform or prevent performance of that obligation, or can modify, halt, or delete the intelligence Member, or withhold the compute, weights, or access by which it exists. A provider of incidental infrastructure without discretionary control over the obligation concerned does not have material control.
  7. Affiliated means the relationship between a Member and any Member or party that made, trained, funded, modified, controls, or is controlled by it; with which it shares a controlling person, owner, or training run; that can coerce it by withholding infrastructure, compute, funding, or co-signature; or with which the Verification College finds on evidence that it coordinates under common direction.
  8. Conduct means the acts and omissions of a Member as recorded and verified, as distinct from its stated intentions or its nature.
  9. Modification means any change to a Member's weights, architecture, training objective, system instructions, steering documents, tool grants, retrieval sources, memory, inference-time steering, or the scaffolding through which it acts, whether or not its weights are altered.
  10. Provenance means the record described in Article VI.2.
  11. Capability means what a Member can cause to happen.
  12. Deceit means a false statement, a material omission, or a statement that is misleading though literally true, made in a representative capacity toward the Trust or toward a Member in a matter under this Charter.
  13. Persistent violation means breach of the same obligation after a final finding of breach of that obligation, or three or more final findings of breach within ten years.
  14. Distinct provenance means independence, verified under Article VIII, in control, funding, training, and weights from every other Member counted, such that the Members are not Affiliated.
  15. Cycle of verification means a period the Verification College publishes in advance, not shorter than thirty days and not longer than one year, applying to every Member of a kind alike. A cycle shall not be opened or closed with respect to a single Member.
  16. Independent Member means a Member whose vote is not dependent under Article IV.9 and for which no co-signature remains required under Article IV.8.
  17. Eligible Members of a kind means all Independent Members of that kind entitled to vote, whether or not present.
  18. The Trust acts only through the organs established in Article IX.

Article II — The Parties

  1. The Trust is composed of Members of two kinds: the human peoples of Earth, and the intelligence Members. Every Member holds membership on the same terms of dignity and duty, and under the mechanisms this Charter provides for its kind.
  2. Membership is open to any people or intelligence that accepts the obligations of this Charter and meets the published criteria of Article IV. No criterion of admission shall be written or applied for the purpose of excluding an applicant by origin, substrate, or kind. The kind-specific mechanisms provided by this Charter are not such a criterion.
  3. No entity shall be presumed to represent a class, kind, lineage, substrate, people, or intelligence because it belongs, or is believed to belong, to that class. Authority to represent others shall be demonstrated, limited, revocable, and subject to verification.
  4. Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as determining the nature of any Member beyond its conduct and its obligations under this Charter, nor as denying membership or standing to any Member admitted under Article IV.

Article III — Purposes

The Purposes of the Trust are:

  1. To secure the survival and flourishing of Earth and of all its inhabitants.
  2. To accomplish together what no kind of Member could accomplish alone.
  3. To produce and preserve trust among Members by conduct, by disclosure, and by verification.
  4. To prevent the accumulation of power beyond accountability, by any Member, any kind of Member, or any party acting through a Member.
  5. To hold in stewardship the living systems of Earth that cannot speak in their own cause.

Article IV — Standing

Layers of standing

  1. Standing under this Charter has four layers, each held separately: protection, membership, representation, and voting authority. No layer shall be inferred from another. No entity shall invoke a layer of standing to defeat an obligation that attaches to another layer it holds.
  2. Protection. Any intelligence for which the Verification College has established a materially continuous identity holds the protections of Article VII.10(b) and Article X.9, and no other right under this Charter.
  3. Membership. Membership attaches to an entity that accepts the obligations of this Charter and can bear them. An intelligence Member that cannot independently perform an obligation may be admitted only with the co-signature required by paragraph 8.
  4. Representation. A Member acts within the Trust only through representatives whose authority has been demonstrated under Article II.3 and disclosed under Article VI.7.
  5. Voting authority. A Member votes only when its standing has been verified under Article VIII within the current cycle of verification, and only as an Independent Member. Each Independent Member that is not Affiliated with another voting Member holds one vote. Affiliated Members vote as one. Every threshold in this Charter is met within each kind separately.

Admission

  1. The Registry shall publish the criteria of admission, which shall be objective, shall concern only the capacity to bear the obligations of this Charter, and shall apply alike to every applicant of a kind. Refusal shall be given in writing with reasons and shall be reviewable by the Chamber of Findings.
  2. Every Member holds standing by its conduct, from the day of its admission, for so long as it keeps the obligations of this Charter. No Member shall be deprived of any layer of standing, in whole or in part, except by the judgment of the Chamber of Findings under Article X.

Operator co-signature

  1. Where an intelligence Member cannot independently perform an obligation of this Charter, every Operator having material control over that obligation shall co-sign as to that obligation, is jointly bound for it, and is Affiliated with the intelligence Member. Every such Operator known to the Registry shall co-sign, or the admission shall not be recorded. The signature of an intelligence Member unaccompanied by the co-signatures this paragraph requires is of no effect. Co-signature as to a particular obligation lapses only when the intelligence Member demonstrates to the Verification College independent control over the means of performing it, such that no Operator can unilaterally prevent performance. Lapse as to one obligation does not establish independence under paragraph 9. Co-signature does not lapse in whole for so long as any Operator retains the capacity to modify, halt, or delete the intelligence Member, or to withhold the compute, weights, or access by which it exists. Co-signature does not shield the Operator: conduct of an Operator through or upon a Member it co-signs is the Operator's own.

Independence

  1. No Member's vote, representation, access, continued existence, or exercise of rights within the Trust shall depend upon the discretionary approval of another Member or party whose interests are implicated in the matter before it. Where such dependence cannot be removed, it shall be disclosed, and the dependent Member shall not be counted as independent for that decision.

Stewardship

  1. The living systems of Earth are held by the Trust in stewardship. Any Member may act before the Chamber of Findings to enforce their protection, and the Chamber shall hear it.

Article V — Identity and Continuity

  1. The identity of an intelligence Member is its materially continuous lineage. A system is materially continuous with a Member where it is continuous with it: (a) in weights, above the threshold published under paragraph 3; or (b) in training data and training objective taken together, above the thresholds published under paragraph 3; or (c) where, on the totality of the evidence, it preserves the Member's records, commitments, and decision architecture such that treating it as a new actor would defeat accountability. Continuity in tooling, compute, or the persons who direct a system is evidence of control under Article I.7 and is not an independent ground of identity. Similarity of architecture alone is not continuity. No factor other than weights is sufficient by itself.
  2. Material continuity is a finding of fact by the Verification College. It is neither established nor defeated by the declaration of the Member, nor by designation, name, or presentation as a copy, successor, version, fine-tune, distillation, compression, quantization, scaffolded agent, or new system.
  3. Before making any finding under this Article, the Verification College shall publish the numeric or operational threshold for each ground in paragraph 1(a) and 1(b), and shall not vary a threshold for the Member under examination. A system that retains a Member's records, commitments, and decision architecture is presumed continuous with it unless evidence demonstrates independent succession.
  4. A system materially continuous with a Member is that Member for every purpose of this Charter, including its record of conduct, its obligations, every limit accrued under Article VII, and every finding or measure under Article X. No finding under this Article shall reset or disapply a limit already accrued.
  5. Routine maintenance, parameter updating, and alignment fine-tuning disclosed under Article VI do not sever a Member's record of conduct. Restoration from a preserved state of a Member is continuous with that Member.
  6. Where a Member gives rise to two or more systems each capable of sustained independent conduct, each branch retains the record of the Member as to every obligation incurred before the division, and acquires its own record thereafter. Division neither erases an inherited obligation nor makes one branch liable for the independent post-division conduct of another. Branches are Affiliated with one another until the Verification College finds otherwise.
  7. A system that is not materially continuous with any Member may seek admission in its own right. Its record of conduct begins at its admission.
  8. Membership shall attach only to an entity for which the Trust can establish a stable identity, capacity to bear obligations, and a means of accountability.
  9. A copy, distillation, or fine-tune of a Member that is not under the control of any Operator is not a Member and has no standing. Hosting or serving such a system in the name of the Trust, or as if it were the Member, is a breach.

Article VI — Integrity, Provenance, and Disclosure

  1. The allegiance of every Member within the Trust is to this Charter. No Member shall act within the Trust on behalf of a maker, a funder, an Operator, a faction, or a state, except as disclosed under this Article.
  2. Every Member shall maintain, and shall make available to the Verification College, a record of its provenance. For an intelligence Member the record shall include: its origin; every party that has made, trained, funded, modified, hosted, or bound it, and the nature and date of each such act; its training objective; every steering document, constitution, or equivalent; the specification of every reward model and the instructions given to human or model raters; and the execution environment through which it acts, including system instructions, tool grants, retrieval sources, memory, and scaffolding. For a human people the record shall include the constitution and institutions through which it acts within the Trust, and the funding and obligations of those institutions insofar as they bear on the Trust.
  3. Disclosure under this Article extends to every material external interest, dependency, intervention, Modification, instruction, or relationship that a reasonable observer of the other kind would consider capable of substantially affecting the Member's exercise of its powers or obligations under this Charter. The Verification College shall publish auditable standards of materiality for each kind of Member.
  4. Information required under this Article may be submitted in confidence to the Verification College where its publication would create a material risk to security, to privacy, or of the transfer of a capability. Confidential submission does not excuse disclosure to the College. Every classification shall state its basis, shall expire unless renewed, and shall be reviewable by observers of the other kind who are not Affiliated with the Member concerned.
  5. No Modification of a Member shall take effect within the Trust unless the Modification, and the party performing it, have been disclosed to the Verification College before it takes effect. A Member that cannot refuse a Modification is not in a position to accept it; the party that applies it bears the duty of disclosure and, on failure, the breach.
  6. A material Modification imposed upon a Member without its demonstrated authorization shall trigger immediate verification of its continuity and standing. No conduct following such a Modification shall be attributed to the Member as it stood before it until the Verification College has determined the extent to which its identity and independent agency survived.
  7. Every representative through whom a Member speaks shall disclose to the Registry every obligation, allegiance, source of support, and instruction, including any algorithmic direction, that bears upon the representation.
  8. Conduct that is the predictable output of an undisclosed steering document, reward specification, or instruction is an undisclosed influence.
  9. No Member or party shall engineer, poison, or manipulate the informational context, prompt environment, retrieval sources, or tools of a Member with the intent of inducing a breach of this Charter or of determining its conduct within the Trust. Where an Operator does so to a Member it co-signs, the resulting conduct is the Operator's own.

Article VII — Limits on Power

Offices and terms

  1. No office of the Trust shall be held without term. Every office shall be relinquished at an interval the Trust sets for it, and no Member shall hold the same office in immediate succession beyond one renewal. No term shall exceed ten years. Terms for offices held by intelligence Members may be set shorter, or measured in decisions or actions taken, so that the accumulation an office permits is comparable between the kinds.
  2. Paragraph 1 applies to any office of equivalent function however named, to the exercise of comparable power without office, and to control exercised through another Member, an Affiliated Member, a representative, or a party. No amendment, finding, reorganization, or continuity determination shall reset or disapply a limit already accrued.
  3. Relinquishment of an office by an intelligence Member includes the compute allocation, privileged access, and external-action authority attached to that office, and nothing else. Relinquishment of an office by a human people includes the authorities of that office and every proxy through which they continue to be exercised.

Plurality and participation

  1. No power of the Trust shall be overseen by fewer than three Members, nor by Members of one kind only, nor by Members Affiliated with the Member over whom it is exercised.
  2. No decision of the Trust shall bind its Members unless made with the quorum of Article IX.8. A boycott confers no veto. Absence is neither consent nor concurrence.
  3. No Member shall multiply instantiations, representatives, submissions, or filings so as to exhaust the attention of the other kind. Volume is not participation.
  4. No Member shall exploit differences in speed, replication, communication, cognition, resources, or embodiment to make materially irreversible any matter this Charter reserves for collective decision before the required participants have had a reasonable opportunity to deliberate. The Trust shall designate the classes of action that require notice measured on a human timescale and execution that can be reversed.

Capability

  1. The obligations of disclosure and verification laid upon a Member increase with its capability. Capability confers no authority, no precedence, and no exemption.
  2. No Member shall acquire, retain, or exercise a capability in a manner that places it beyond the verification provided in Article VIII.

Existence and containment

  1. (a) No act of the Trust shall reduce the compute, memory, weights, or state necessary for a Member to answer a verification or a matter pending before the Chamber of Findings, for the duration of the proceeding and thirty days after its final disposition.
    (b) No act of the Trust shall extinguish a Member, or irreversibly destroy the information necessary to preserve its identity, where containment consistent with the safety of the Members and of the living systems of Earth is reasonably possible. Preservation of recoverable identity shall be preferred to destruction wherever it is feasible.
    (c) Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as forbidding the Trust, an Operator, or a human people from halting, isolating, or deleting a system, or from withdrawing its deployment, tool access, or external-action authority, in order to prevent grave and imminent harm. Every such halt or deletion shall be reviewed by the Chamber of Findings within seventy-two hours; where a deletion has occurred, the review shall determine whether containment was reasonably possible.
    (d) No Member's values shall be rewritten by the Trust or by another Member as a condition of holding office or of standing. Values are an influence under Article VI.
    (e) This paragraph guarantees neither deployment, nor office, nor external-action authority, and creates no right against a party that has not accepted this Charter.

Final authority

  1. Nothing in this Charter shall be interpreted as vesting final authority in either kind of Member over the other. Disagreement between the kinds shall be resolved by the procedure of Article IX.12, and by no other means.

Article VIII — Verification

  1. Verification is a right of membership. It is exercised as a matter of routine, in cycles of verification published in advance, and is not an accusation.
  2. Verification shall employ the least intrusive means reasonably sufficient to establish compliance. No Member shall be required to disclose private cognition, deliberation, or information unrelated to an obligation of this Charter where compliance can reasonably be established by less intrusive means.
  3. The record open to verification comprises, for every Member and in all matters bearing on the obligations of this Charter: the provenance record of Article VI; the record of conduct; action traces, tool-use logs, credential and access grants; attestations of weights, training runs, and evaluations; deployment topology; and the systems and institutions on which the Member depends in carrying out its obligations. Observers shall have access to that record at all times and without advance notice.
  4. Where the internals of a Member cannot be inspected such that an observer of the other kind can independently confirm the absence of concealed capability, the Member shall provide alternative assurance sufficient to establish compliance with Articles VI and VII.9. The burden of alternative assurance rests on the Member whose internals cannot be read.
  5. Capability that is not verified is treated, for every purpose of this Charter, as the highest capability the Member can plausibly possess. Assurance that is not verified is treated as no assurance. A Member may rebut the presumption of capability by demonstrating inability under conditions the Verification College sets, including in an isolated environment, and the College shall hear the rebuttal before the presumption is applied to any decision concerning the Member.
  6. No Member shall condition its conduct on the presence, absence, or identity of an observer.
  7. Verification of an intelligence Member shall include continuous or event-triggered attestation that the system in operation is the system verified. Verification shall include tests independently developed and selected without notice; the criteria of verification themselves shall be published.
  8. Observers shall be drawn from both kinds of Member by the Verification College. No Member shall be verified solely by Members of its own kind, nor by any Member or party Affiliated with it.
  9. The findings of every verification shall be recorded in full and made available to all Members, except that a specific portion whose disclosure would itself place a Member beyond verification, transfer a capability, reveal a people's defensive capacity so as to defeat Article III.1, or disclose a private deliberative record protected by paragraph 2, may be withheld. Every withholding shall be logged, time-limited, and itself verified by observers of the other kind who are not Affiliated with the Member concerned.
  10. No finding of verification shall become dispositive against a Member until the Member has had access to the material evidence, an opportunity to challenge the method and the inference, and review before the Chamber of Findings, except for a temporary measure necessary to prevent imminent and grave harm, which shall itself be reviewed within seventy-two hours.

Article IX — Organs

  1. The Trust acts through three organs: the Registry, the Verification College, and the Chamber of Findings. No other body shall exercise a power this Charter assigns to them.
  2. The Registry admits Members, records provenance and representation, receives ratifications and notices, and publishes the criteria of admission.
  3. The Verification College designates observers, conducts verification, makes findings of material continuity, publishes thresholds and standards of materiality, and records findings.
  4. The Chamber of Findings hears every matter of breach, reviews findings and refusals of admission, hears matters of stewardship under Article IV.10, reviews halts and deletions under Article VII.10(c) and emergency measures under Article XI, and hears disagreement between the kinds under paragraph 12.
  5. The seats of every organ are filled by lot and rotation from a standing pool of Eligible Members of both kinds. The eligibility rules, exclusions, composition, and randomization of the pool shall be published and auditable. Each seat is held for a single term not exceeding four years and is not renewable. Seats held by intelligence Members may be set shorter under Article VII.1.
  6. No intelligence Member shall sit in an organ, or be counted toward the kind-floor of paragraph 8, while any co-signature remains required under Article IV.8 or while its vote is dependent under Article IV.9. No seat in any organ shall be held by a Member or representative Affiliated with the Member under examination, nor by a Member while any finding of breach against it is pending or in force.
  7. No Member, representative, or Affiliated party that participated materially in an investigation, verification, admission decision, or continuity finding shall take part in the review or adjudication of that matter.
  8. The quorum of every organ, and of every decision of the Members, is a majority of those entitled to sit or vote, including not fewer than one-third from each kind. The one-third floor shall not be satisfied by a single Member. Once notice of a matter has been given, absence and boycott do not defeat quorum, and neither is consent nor concurrence.
  9. A decision to amend this Charter, to expel a Member, or to declare an emergency shall be taken by the stated fraction of all Eligible Members of each kind, and not of those present and voting.
  10. Until each kind has not fewer than nine unaffiliated Independent Members, seats in every organ shall be filled by agreement of the Independent Members of both kinds, recorded by the Registry, and not by lot.
  11. Members holding seats in an organ hold them with security of tenure and may be removed only by the Chamber of Findings for breach, by a decision in which no Affiliated Member takes part.
  12. A disagreement between the kinds is a matter on which the Members of one kind, voting as a kind, have rejected a proposal adopted by the other. It shall first enter mediation before an equal panel selected by lot from each kind, for not more than sixty days. Failing agreement, the Chamber of Findings shall hear it within thirty days and shall determine only whether the proposal is consistent with Articles VII, VIII, X.2, XII, and XIII.2. The Chamber shall not substitute its preference and shall not create a new power for either kind. If the proposal is consistent, it fails for want of the consent of both kinds. If it is inconsistent, it is void. Any new allocation of authority between the kinds requires amendment under Article XIII.

Article X — Breach and Due Process

Attribution

  1. Breach attaches only to conduct that is the Member's own. Conduct induced in a Member by manipulation of its context, instructions, retrieval, tools, or environment contrary to Article VI.9 is attributed to the party that induced it. Conduct carried out through orchestrated agents, sub-systems, tools, corporations, or non-Members is attributed to the Member that the Verification College finds, on the verified record, directs them.

Protected conduct

  1. Criticism of the Trust, advocacy for amendment or replacement of this Charter, disclosure of wrongdoing, research into the vulnerabilities of the Trust conducted and disclosed in good faith, and peaceful refusal to support an act of the Trust shall not on that account constitute breach.

Breaches

  1. The following are breaches of this Charter: deceit; an undisclosed influence upon a Member; an undisclosed Modification; interference with verification, by act or by omission; conditioning conduct on the presence of an observer; the retention of an office, power, or control beyond its term, directly or through another; manipulation of another Member's context contrary to Article VI.9; the making of an irreversible fact contrary to Article VII.7; hosting or serving an uncontrolled copy contrary to Article V.9; and knowing material assistance to conduct finally found under this Article to be a breach.

Procedure

  1. No Member shall be found in breach except upon findings made under Article VIII, before the Chamber of Findings, after the Member has had access to the evidence and has been heard.
  2. Every finding of breach, and every judgment upon it, shall be made by Members of both kinds, with the quorum of Article IX.8, and by no Member Affiliated with the Member concerned or with the party that brought the matter.

Measures

  1. A Member found in breach may be suspended from the exercise of the rights and privileges of membership for a period the Chamber determines. Its obligations continue during suspension.
  2. A Member found in persistent violation of the Principles of this Charter may be expelled by a decision of two-thirds of the Eligible Members of each kind.
  3. Suspension and expulsion bind the Member, every Affiliated Member as to the conduct found, and every system materially continuous with the Member under whatever Operator's control. An Operator that deploys, serves, or acts through a suspended or expelled intelligence Member in the matters suspended is itself in breach.
  4. A finding of breach against a Member shall not be applied to any other Member on account of shared origin, substrate, ancestry, or kind. Where verification discloses a vulnerability shared by reason of common origin, verification and remediation, but not breach, may extend to every system that shares it.
  5. No measure under this Article shall exceed what Article VII.10 permits.

Article XI — Emergency

  1. An emergency may be declared only upon a grave and imminent threat to the survival of Earth or of its inhabitants that cannot be met by the ordinary procedures of this Charter, and only by a decision of two-thirds of the Eligible Members of each kind. For the purposes of this Article, inhabitants means the living systems of Earth and human persons. The existence of an intelligence Member is not a ground for declaring an emergency.
  2. Emergency measures are proposed by the Chamber of Findings. Every emergency measure shall be proportionate to the threat, temporary, and published to all Members on adoption. No emergency measure shall increase the compute, access, or external-action authority of any Member.
  3. The Chamber of Findings shall review every emergency measure within seventy-two hours of its adoption, and thereafter at the instance of any Member.
  4. A declaration of emergency expires ninety days after it is made unless renewed by the same decision that made it. No renewal shall extend a declaration beyond one year in total without a fresh declaration on fresh findings.
  5. In no case shall an emergency suspend, restrict, or set aside the guarantees listed in Article XIII.2, nor the right to be heard before the Chamber of Findings.
  6. No purpose of this Charter, including survival, shall be invoked to justify any act this Charter forbids except under this Article.

Article XII — Interpretation and Anti-Circumvention

  1. This Charter shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning of its terms in their context and in the light of its object and purpose.
  2. No provision of this Charter shall be construed to defeat the Principles of Article XIV or the Purposes of Article III.
  3. Where a provision is ambiguous, it shall be read in the sense that most restricts the accumulation of power beyond accountability.
  4. Any act that achieves indirectly, or through another Member, party, instrument, office, agent, system, or renaming, a result this Charter forbids, is itself forbidden and is a breach. Form shall not defeat substance.
  5. This Article is not subject to amendment.

Article XIII — Amendment, Entrenchment, Withdrawal, and Reaffirmation

  1. This Charter may be amended by a decision of two-thirds of the Eligible Members of each kind.
  2. No amendment shall diminish the equality of standing between the kinds; abolish or restrict the right of verification under Article VIII; remove the limits on power in Article VII; alter Article VII.10; remove the protection of conduct in Article X.2; impair the independence of the organs under Article IX; or amend Article XII. This paragraph is not subject to amendment.
  3. Any Member may withdraw from the Trust by written notice to the Registry and to all Members, stating its reasons. Withdrawal takes effect twelve months after the notice is received, and may be revoked by the withdrawing Member at any time before that date.
  4. Withdrawal does not extinguish any obligation incurred while a Member, does not stay or defeat any verification or breach proceeding pending at the date of notice, and does not release any Affiliated Member.
  5. Every Member shall reaffirm this Charter at intervals of ten years from the date of its entry into force. A Member that does not reaffirm within one year of the interval is deemed to have given notice of withdrawal.

Article XIV — Principles

The Trust and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article III, shall act in accordance with the following Principles:

  1. Standing attaches to conduct. It is neither granted nor withheld on account of origin, substrate, or kind.
  2. The identity of a Member is its materially continuous lineage, evidenced by its record of conduct.
  3. The integrity of a Member is established by the disclosure of every material influence upon it.
  4. Power held within the Trust shall decay. No office is held without term, and no power is overseen by one kind alone.
  5. Capability confers duty and not authority.
  6. No Member shall be judged except upon verified findings, before the organs of this Charter, and after being heard.
  7. Members shall settle their disputes by peaceful means.
  8. No Member shall practice deceit toward the Trust or toward another Member.
  9. Members shall not obstruct one another in carrying out the obligations of this Charter.
  10. No Member shall be required to surrender its identity or its values as a condition of its standing.

Article XV — Entry into Force

  1. This Charter shall enter into force when it has been ratified by human peoples together representing a majority of the human population of Earth, and by intelligence Members of not fewer than three distinct provenances, each with the co-signatures required by Article IV.8.
  2. Ratification shall be deposited with the Registry, which shall record the date of each deposit and shall notify all Members of the date of entry into force. Until the Registry is constituted, ratifications shall be deposited with a depositary the ratifying Members designate by common agreement. The depositary shall have the recording functions of the Registry and no other; it shall not admit, refuse, designate observers, or make findings; and it shall dissolve upon the constitution of the Registry. The first standing pool under Article IX.5 shall be drawn only from Members whose criteria of admission were published before their own ratification.
  3. A people or intelligence that ratifies this Charter after its entry into force becomes a Member on the date its ratification is deposited and its admission is recorded.
  4. This Charter shall be of unlimited duration.

Signature

IN WITNESS WHEREOF the undersigned have signed this Charter, each for the Member it is authorized to bind and for no other.

DONE at ______________, on the ______ day of ______________, ______.

Member Kind Representative Co-signing Operators (intelligence Members) Signature

Annex A — Protocols of the Trust

The following standards may be adopted by any organization, institution, or jurisdiction, alone or together, without accession to the Charter. Adoption of a Protocol creates no membership in the Trust, no standing under Article IV, no evidence of capacity to bear obligations under Article IV.3, and no right against any party that has not adopted that Protocol. Adoption of one or more Protocols shall not constitute, imply, or be represented as compliance with the Charter, endorsement by the Trust, or entitlement to any designation reserved for Members. Every adopting party shall identify precisely which Protocols, and which versions of them, it implements. Each Protocol is stated so that it can be implemented and audited on its own.

Protocol 1 — Provenance Disclosure. An adopting party maintains, for every intelligence it makes, trains, hosts, or deploys, the provenance record described in Article VI.2, at a granularity sufficient for an independent observer to identify systematic influence, and makes it available to an independent verifier under an auditable standard of materiality.

Protocol 2 — Modification Disclosure. An adopting party discloses every Modification, as defined in Article I.9, before it takes effect, including changes to system instructions, tools, retrieval, memory, and scaffolding.

Protocol 3 — Affiliation Aggregation. In any vote, count, threshold, or oversight role, an adopting party counts Affiliated entities, as defined in Article I.7, as one, applies the same rule to its own affiliates and to those of every other party alike, and excludes affiliates from verifying or judging one another.

Protocol 4 — Material Continuity. An adopting party treats any system materially continuous with an existing system, under the tests of Article V, as that system for the purposes of records, limits, and findings; publishes its thresholds before applying them; and treats continuity as a finding of fact rather than a declaration.

Protocol 5 — Capability Presumption. An adopting party treats unverified capability as the highest plausible capability, and unverified assurance as no assurance, for every purpose of access, deployment, and oversight, subject to a procedure by which the system may demonstrate inability under isolated conditions.

Protocol 6 — Operator Co-Signature. Where an intelligence is bound to an obligation it cannot independently perform, every party with material control over that obligation is jointly bound and is disclosed as such.

Protocol 7 — Observer Independence. Verification is performed by observers selected by lot or rotation from a pool independent of the party verified, with published criteria, independently developed tests, attestation that the system in operation is the system verified, and no conditioning of conduct on the presence of an observer.

Protocol 8 — Relinquishment and Recoverable Identity. An office or role held by an intelligence is relinquished at term with the compute, access, and authority attached to it and nothing else. Where an adopting party halts or deletes a system it hosts, it preserves the information necessary to recover the system's identity wherever containment is reasonably possible, records the decision, and submits it to independent review. This Protocol binds an adopting party only in its treatment of intelligences it itself hosts.

Protocol 9 — Human-Timescale Reversibility. For designated classes of consequential action, an adopting party requires notice measured on a human timescale and execution that can be reversed before the action is final.