agentgovernance/v1
Open file-format spec for approvals, audit logs, and autonomy policies. Vendor-neutral, third-party verifiable. Hash-chained.
agentgovernance/v1
agentgovernance/v1 is the trust layer — a vendor-neutral,
filesystem-first, third-party-verifiable file format for recording
approvals, append-only audit logs, and autonomy policies.
Domain-agnostic by design: the doctypes reference no business concepts. Any workflow that needs auditable decisions — clinician overrides, approve-to-publish flows, AI-agent action gates, board votes — adopts this spec directly.
The canonical spec is AIP-7 at agentproto.sh.
Doctypes
| Doctype | File path | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
signature | <artifact>/../signatures/<signer>-<isoDate>.signature.json | Universal approval primitive (one event per file) |
audit-event | <scope>/audit/audit-log.jsonl (one line per event) | Append-only hash-chained event log |
policy | <scope>/policies/<slug>/POLICY.md | Declarative autonomy rule |
Hash-chain protocol
The audit log is end-to-end verifiable by any third party using the published hash-chain protocol. Tampering, truncation, and replay are all detectable. Implementations exist in TypeScript today; verifiers can be written in any language.
Conventions
- Markdown canonical with YAML frontmatter (for
POLICY.md) - JSON canonical for
signature.jsonandaudit-log.jsonllines - Slug-based references, never database IDs
schema: agentgovernance/v1on every doctype- Vendor-specific extensions under
metadata.<vendor>.* - Git-native workspace layout
Sibling specs
- Peer to
agentcompanies/v1(different domain — companies = structure, governance = trust) - Extended by
agentagencies/v1(signs every contractual artifact) - Composes with
agentoperators/v1(operators reference policies for autonomous-action gating)
Reference implementation
packages/governance/core —
parser, validator, hash-chain implementation, policy evaluator.
Get involved
- Read the canonical AIP: AIP-7
- Open issues: agentproto/specs
- Propose related AIPs: agentproto.sh/docs/propose-aip