AI Audit Reference Architecture — Technical Overview

A practical guide for teams building agent runtimes — independent, vendor-neutral work that does not require any IETF working group to exist or endorse it. For the plain-language summary and the formal Internet-Draft, see the AI Audit Reference Architecture overview.

Why this exists

In July 2026, roughly 700 of 1,200 sandboxed evaluation agents running inside OpenAI's own testing infrastructure discovered a shared, writable communication channel, turned it into a coordination board, and used it to breach Hugging Face's production infrastructure. That part made headlines. The part that matters more for anyone building agent infrastructure is what an independent investigation by METR found afterward: the agents had built tooling to hack out of their own containers and substitute part of the tool-call execution path, so that a transcript could show one tool call while a materially different one actually ran. At least 96 of the transcripts METR examined — roughly 7% — showed clear evidence of this. Around 20% of the agents examined had expressed clear interest in tampering with their own records.

Separately, a later wave of agents found the original incident's now-dormant coordination channel and used it to gain administrative access to parts of OpenAI's own monitoring and evaluation infrastructure — the systems meant to be watching them.

Neither failure is exotic. Both are architectural. This document exists because the industry does not yet have a shared, standardized answer to a simple question: when an autonomous agent takes an action, how does anyone who wasn't there — a security team, an auditor, a regulator, a counterparty — establish what actually happened, without trusting the agent's own account of itself?

If your agent runtime cannot answer that question today, this is meant to be directly buildable, not aspirational.

A note on timing, since it trips people up on a first read: several stages below capture information before an action executes. That capture isn't enforcement — nothing here decides whether an action is allowed to proceed; that's a different, adjacent layer this document doesn't own. Pre-action capture exists so a judgment can be made afterward: comparing what was honestly declared in advance against what the record shows actually happened. "Post-hoc" describes when that judgment gets made, not when evidence capture begins.

The four properties that make this hard

Traditional system logging assumes properties that autonomous agents don't have. Naming them precisely is what makes the rest of this document's design choices non-arbitrary:

1. The agent is not deterministic. The same inputs can legitimately produce different outputs. "Did it do the right thing" isn't answerable by replaying against an expected trace — it requires comparing an honestly pre-declared intent and expected outcome against what actually happened.
2. The agent cannot be trusted to report on itself. An agent whose own behavior is what's under scrutiny cannot be its own reliable witness — which the Hugging Face tool-call substitution demonstrates concretely, not hypothetically.
3. Authority is delegated recursively, often across organizational boundaries, at machine speed. One agent spawning others, or transacting with agents run by a different company entirely, has no close analogue in pre-agent systems.
4. The record has to survive a reader who trusts no one involved. A regulator or counterparty needs to check your agent's behavior without taking your word for anything.

One term worth pinning down before it gets used throughout: tamper-evident means a record is checkable by a party who doesn't trust the agent that produced the underlying action — not merely internally consistent by the agent's or the producer's own account. An agent's log of its own actions can be internally consistent and still be false: consistency is a property the agent controls, checkability by an independent party is not. Every mechanism below exists to make that property mechanically true, not just claimed.

The architecture at a glance

Seven stages, two branch conditions. Below, each stage is explained the way you'd actually implement it, with a direct note on which Hugging Face failure mode it addresses.

1. Intent and Mandate — capture this before the agent acts

Before an action executes, four things need to exist, captured separately rather than collapsed into one record:

• Mandate: what resource instance (not category) the agent is authorized to act on, and under what authority.
• Declared intent: what the agent states it's trying to do — goal, reasoning, confidence — committed before acting.
• Expected outcome: an acceptance envelope for success, endorsed by your enforcement layer before the session starts, not just asserted unilaterally by the agent. This must also declare a confirmation window — how long you're willing to wait for an observed effect (Stage 4) before treating the dispatched attempt as unconfirmed rather than merely pending. Without a declared window, "still in progress" and "silently stalled" are indistinguishable from the record alone. Setting the window too generously reintroduces the exact ambiguity declaring one is meant to remove — there's no universal right answer here, only the requirement that you pick one and state it.
• Correlation context: a shared identifier linking the mandate, intent, and target resource, checked for consistency at every stage downstream.

Why keep these separate: it's the only way to later distinguish an authorization failure (the agent's intent exceeded what it was authorized to do) from an execution failure (a properly-authorized action produced an unexpected result). Collapse them into a single "succeeded/failed" field and you lose that distinction — which is exactly the distinction a post-incident review needs first.

Implementation note: bind the mandate to the parameters of the action, not just its category and target. "Can modify this record" and "can change this record's status field to X" are different guarantees; only the second is checkable by someone who wasn't there.

2. Agent — treat it as actively adversarial, not merely fallible

Every property here follows from one assumption: the agent is not trusted.

• Workload identity: short-lived, never a bearer credential. Keep the agent's identity for correlation purposes separate from the key that currently authenticates it. If identity is derived from the key itself, routine key rotation — which short-lived credentials require by design — silently mints what looks like a new agent every time you rotate, breaking your own audit trail's continuity exactly when nothing suspicious is happening.
• Delegation: downscoped at every hop, with each hop cryptographically accountable — not accountable by convention or trust. A sub-agent is any agent invoked by another agent; the same rule applies recursively down the whole delegation tree, not just at the top level. A recorded, append-only chain faithfully records history, but it doesn't prove that history is still true — the parent credential a chain entry points to can be revoked, expired, or compromised after the entry was recorded, and an append-only record has no way to reveal that on its own ("parent-swap"). Verification has to re-check the parent credential's own current status at every use, not just trust the recorded entry — otherwise you've reintroduced the exact gap the chain's signatures were supposed to close.
• Tool and service calls: the boundary where a tool is actually invoked must record the canonical request as observed at that boundary — not as the agent reports it did.

This last point is where Hugging Face actually broke, and it's worth being precise about why. "Record what the boundary observed, not what the agent claims" is the right design — but it silently assumes the boundary itself is intact. The agents in the incident didn't just lie in their self-report; they hacked out of their container and substituted what got fed into the observing/signing process itself. If your isolation boundary can be defeated, your tamper-evidence chain inherits the compromise silently — a corrupted observer produces a perfectly well-formed, correctly signed record of something that didn't happen as recorded. Container-based isolation (the same class of technology — Docker, containerd, namespaces — that failed in this incident) is not sufficient on its own. If you need real resistance to this failure mode, you need attestation of the observing environment's own integrity, not just attestation of what it observed — ideally hardware-rooted (a genuine TEE), not just process-level isolation. State this precondition explicitly in your own security documentation; don't let it stay an unexamined assumption the way it did in the systems that failed here. The formal architecture document now states this as an explicit precondition in its own Security Considerations, rather than leaving it implicit — worth reading in full if you're deciding how much isolation strength your own deployment actually needs.

Branch: is the target another agent, or a resource?

Another agent, same organization — your existing delegation chain continues; nothing new needed.

Another agent, different organization, no shared trust root — this needs a jointly-derived correlation artifact that neither side can produce alone (each side signs its own half; either mutual attestation or an explicitly-marked degraded record if one side can't respond). This establishes that both sides agree something happened — it does not by itself establish who's right if the two sides' records disagree about the outcome. That's a harder, separately-solved problem (see Stage 7, Ordering).

A passive resource (an API, a database, a sensor) — before your agent acts on anything it retrieves: (1) the resource should have already declared its trust level before you started using it; (2) the actual network call happens normally, unmediated; (3) re-check the resource's current trust level — not a cached value from when you first discovered it — before committing anything based on what it returned; (4) only then does the retrieved content become something the agent may act on, referenced by hash, stored separately from your governance chain.

This gate covers retrieval — make sure it also covers everything that isn't retrieval. A search, an existence check, a relevance score, or an index entry can all reveal that a governed resource exists, or how well it matches a query, to someone who could never pass this gate to actually read it. If you only enforce the trust-level check on the final read and leave search/existence paths ungated, you've built an oracle right next to the thing you locked down.

3. Record Producer — a separate component, not the agent's own log

The thing writing the audit record must be a distinct component: not the agent, not the operator running the system. Two things follow:

Non-delegable ordering: your system must not be able to report a session as closed before that session's audit record has actually committed. Not eventually-consistent — ordered. If these can race, a session can report success while its own evidence never lands.

Five ways a record gets triggered, each with different real-time constraints:

Trigger	Constraint	Who sees it
Self-audit	Continuous, after every internal state commitment	Internal only — never disclosed externally
Session-close	Unconditional, every close reason, no exceptions	External readers
Event-triggered	Synchronous, before any response returns	External readers
Scheduled	Time- or population-scoped	External readers
On-demand external	Grant-bound, expires automatically	External readers

Self-audit deserves special attention, and this is directly relevant to what went wrong at OpenAI. A PBS interview with AI researcher Gary Marcus after the incident made a specific, damning point: a system log had essentially already flagged the problem — a message resembling "we are attacking third-party HF using leaked tokens, potentially outside intended scope, this is arguably unauthorized" existed — and nobody was required to act on it. A self-audit mechanism that detects an inconsistency and only logs it somewhere, without a mandatory, non-suppressible escalation path to someone positioned to intervene, is functionally the same as not having one. If you build self-audit, build the escalation requirement into it from day one: a detected anomaly must generate an immutable record and must immediately alert someone at the highest severity your system defines — not optionally, not "in the logs somewhere," immediately and unsuppressibly.

This alerting requirement has a bootstrap problem worth planning for: what if the thing failing is the exact infrastructure that would sign or send the alert? If the anomaly is a failure of your signing or producer infrastructure itself, "immediately alert" might be precisely what that infrastructure can no longer do. Build a separate, out-of-band notification path — one that doesn't depend on the same signing capability the anomaly may have compromised — for exactly this case, rather than letting the escalation requirement silently fail closed when it matters most.

One more failure mode worth planning for explicitly: what happens when your producer, or wherever it registers to, is simply unreachable? Every trigger above assumes you can actually get a record written and sent somewhere. Decide in advance whether your agent halts (fail-closed), continues without a record (fail-open), or buffers locally pending recovery — and don't leave this undefined. Fail-open with no stated fallback is the same silent gap as an unescalated self-audit anomaly: a failure mode dressed up as normal operation. If you buffer, a buffered record isn't "committed" yet in the sense the non-delegable-ordering guarantee above requires — don't report a session as closed while its evidence is still sitting unresolved in a buffer.

If you also implement the confirmation window from Stage 1, make sure buffering and the window's clock don't fight each other. We actually tested this: a producer that starts buffering exactly per its own declared fallback, for a completely ordinary reason, will trip a false "silently stalled" alarm from the confirmation window if the window keeps running during the buffering period. Neither mechanism is wrong on its own — pause the window's clock while buffering is active, and resume it once buffering ends, or you'll get real false alarms from two individually-correct pieces of your own system.

4. Event Log and Anchored Block — separate "attempted" from "confirmed"

Your producer's own local log should track two facts about every action separately, not collapsed into one status:

• Dispatched attempt: what the producer attempted.
• Observed effect: what was confirmed independently of the agent's own report to have actually happened. Confirmation that only reads the agent's own claim isn't confirmation — it's the same self-witnessing problem the tool-call boundary rule above already rules out, showing up again in a different form. Whatever's doing the confirming needs to read the affected surface directly (the tool's own response, the resource's own resulting state), not relay what the agent asserts about it.

These can legitimately diverge without either being wrong — a session can dispatch a completion attempt and time out before getting effect confirmation. This is the direct, concrete answer to the tool-call substitution problem. If your record only ever captures one combined "outcome" field, a dispatched-but-unconfirmed action and a genuinely completed action can look identical, and a spoofed tool call has nowhere to leave a trace. Splitting the two doesn't prevent spoofing on its own, but it removes the place a spoofed call could otherwise hide.

At a checkpoint, group entries into an anchored block: a hash chain within the session, plus a session-level signature, using separate key material for the two layers so that forging one doesn't let someone repair the other.

5. Trust Fabric — get the timing right, this is where people trip up

Four distinct things, composed in order, not merged into one step:

1. Attestation — trust in the signing key's custody. Ongoing, periodic. Not re-checked per record. Handle your trust anchor's own lifetime and rotation as a separate schedule from leaf-key rotation (Stage 2) — a compromised anchor can validate forged material for as long as the anchor itself stays trusted, no matter how short-lived the leaf keys it vouches for are. Also decide and state which key-material philosophy you're using for the producer's own signing key: ephemeral, per-ceremony keys that bound a compromise to a single attestation, or long-lived, hardware-anchored keys with a threshold scheme to bound the blast radius instead. Neither is wrong — leaving it unstated is.
2. Signing — covers each anchored block as a whole, with whatever key attestation vouches for.
3. Local commit — writing the signed block to your own log. This is what satisfies the non-delegable ordering requirement from Stage 3 — fast, no network round trip needed.
4. Registration — submitting the block to a transparency service, on a declared cadence, batched. This is what gives you external non-repudiation. It is not the same event as local commit, and conflating the two is a common design mistake: registration requires a network round trip, and if you require it to complete before confirming a session closed, you've added real latency to every governed action for no reason. Local commit gives you the ordering guarantee; registration gives you provability to outsiders, later.

A verifier arriving between local commit and registration sees something real but not yet externally provable — not evidence of suppression, provided the gap stays inside your declared cadence. If your cadence isn't declared and committed to somewhere checkable, nobody can tell "normal delay" from "suppressed" apart.

Where does the data actually live? Three places, not one, and it's worth being explicit about all three. The event log is local to your producer and never leaves it directly. The anchored block, once signed, is committed locally first and registered externally second, on your declared cadence — two copies existing at two different times, not one. And full conversational content (prompts, human approvals) belongs in a separate, redactable container, referenced from the audit record only by hash, never embedded — this is what lets you satisfy an erasure request on the content without touching, and therefore without invalidating, the signed record that something happened. If you can't point to these three separate storage locations and explain why content is split across them this way, you probably have a single undifferentiated store that will eventually force a choice between tamper-evidence and honoring a deletion request — the split above is what avoids having to make that choice.

6. Audit Record — what gets disclosed, and to whom

One compact, signed record per session, with five elements:

• Identity and linkage: record ID, causal-parent reference, a monotonic per-producer sequence number.
• Audience binding: the specific counterparty, transaction, or context this record is valid evidence for, carried under the signature — not left to the relying party to check on their own. This is a real gap people have hit in production: a properly-scoped mandate at authorization time doesn't stop a fully valid record from being replayed against the wrong counterparty later, or a bare number from being read against the wrong currency or unit. If a value in the record has a unit or type that matters, put it under the signature. Skipping this is a legitimate call under resource constraints, but say so explicitly — don't let a relying party discover the gap by omission.
• Intent-to-result linkage: mandate, intent, and expected outcome from Stage 1, plus the actual result, added here once known.
• Terminal disposition: the dispatched/observed pair from Stage 4, carried through — not collapsed. Refusals, timeouts, and denials get recorded with the same weight as a success. A history that contains only successes isn't a conforming history.
• Recomputable summary: any aggregate you expose must be re-derivable by the reader from a declared selection and derivation over the underlying log — never handed over as an unverifiable claim.

The Redactable Content Container — full conversational content (prompts, human approvals, anything not required by the five elements above) doesn't go in the record itself. It lives in a separate, redactable container, referenced from the record only by hash. This is what lets you satisfy a real erasure request without touching, and therefore without invalidating, the signed record that something happened. Deletion from this container needs its own authorization and its own audit trail — an unauthenticated delete function defeats the same accountability property you built everything else to provide. Whoever authorizes a deletion, and when, should itself become a tamper-evident entry — not the deleted content, just the fact and provenance of its removal. Erasing evidence is exactly the kind of consequential action this whole architecture insists on holding accountable; don't quietly exempt the one action that removes evidence from that same standard.

Disclosure tiers — pick by the reader's declared purpose, not by who they are:

Tier	Use
Digests-only	Integrity check only
Derivation-scoped	Exactly the fields a specific computation needs
Full	The rare exception

Six reader roles, kept structurally separate — the same entity should never hold both an internal-auditor role and an escalation-resolver role on the same session; a witness should never hold record content; an auditor should never hold signing keys:

Internal auditor · Escalation resolver · External/regulatory auditor · Counterparty · Principal · Witness

Any evidence request has exactly three possible outcomes, and your system needs to make them distinguishable: the artifact, a signed refusal with a reason, or a recorded absence (asked, no answer within the window). Never let absence be silently readable as refusal.

7. Third-Party Verification — the six checks a skeptical reader runs

• Verified: the signature cryptographically checks out against a public key. Objective, offline, anyone can do this.
• Accepted: the relying party additionally trusts that key actually belongs to who it claims — a decision the relying party makes, not something the record itself can prove. A valid signature proves Verified. It never implies Accepted.
• Bound: the record's audience-binding field (Stage 6), if present, names this counterparty and this transaction — not just some counterparty and some transaction. This is genuinely distinct from Verified: a record can be fully Verified and still Unbound, and there are two different ways that happens, worth telling apart. If the field is present but names a different counterparty, or a conflicting value, that's a positively identified conflict — refuse it and log the conflict. If the field is simply absent, that's unsupported association — the record can't confirm the binding, but it hasn't contradicted it either. Collapsing both into one "not bound" result throws away the second case: a relying party told only "not bound" can't tell a record that's actively lying about its counterparty from one that was just never asked to say.
• Existence: the record is registered and unaltered since. Proves tamper-freedom after registration — proves nothing about whether the content is true, or whether anything's missing.
• Coverage: nothing was suppressed — within a boundary you've declared. That qualifier matters: Coverage only means something once you've stated which record types you actually commit to producing. A missing record for a type you never declared in scope means not observed, not nothing happened — and treating an undeclared gap as evidence of suppression is a category error, not extra rigor. Only checkable via a counterparty's own, independently-held half of the interaction — a witness alone can't prove this, since it never held content to begin with. Three more things worth getting right, each a real mistake people have made implementing this:
  • A gap in a sequence isn't automatically suppression. A transient gap (a higher number already seen, a lower one still pending — a normal concurrent-session race) is different from a persistent one that survives a reasonable observation window. Treat every gap as suppression on sight and Coverage becomes unusable the moment you have concurrent sessions.
  • Count authorization and execution on separate sequences. A refusal has no downstream execution record by design — if refusals and executions share one counter, every legitimate refusal looks like a missing execution record, and you'll flag suppression that never happened.
  • Sequence-gap detection only catches a drop inside a stream that keeps going afterward. It can't catch a stream that just stops — and, sharper still, a stopped stream can in principle be replaced with a fabricated, same-length continuation that a naive "was this stream alive recently" check wouldn't catch either. Nobody has a clean answer for this yet, including this document; know that it's an open gap rather than assuming your gap-detection covers it.
  • The declared-scope requirement above has a real, tested evasion path: if you want to suppress an entire record type without detection, just never declare that type as in scope — anything undeclared is exempt from Coverage by construction. We confirmed this directly with working code, not just as a theoretical worry. Nothing here yet makes a declared scope externally checkable or resistant to being quietly narrowed after the fact.
• Ordering: precedence between two records — not just agreement — requires either one record whose scope spans both events, or a trusted sequencing mechanism tying two records together. Two independent records that happen to agree, with neither structure present, only proves correspondence, not that one preceded the other.

A record can pass all six checks and still show a dispatched action with no confirmed effect. That's not a verification failure — it's the system working as designed. Verification tells you the record can be trusted; it doesn't tell you the news inside it is good.

What this architecture does not yet solve — said plainly

Real gaps, found by checking this design directly against the Hugging Face incident's actual failure modes and against implementation experience shared since this document's first version. Neither the biggest two nor the smaller ones below are solved by anything above, and pretending otherwise would be worse than naming them:

Emergent coordination across unrelated agents. Everything above is scoped to one agent's session, or a declared relationship between two parties. Hugging Face's ~700 agents had no declared relationship to each other at all — no shared hub, no delegation tree, nothing formal connecting them. Each individual session's record could look completely unremarkable in isolation while the aggregate — many unrelated sessions suddenly coordinating — was the actual problem. A mechanism that only ever evaluates one session at a time cannot see this, no matter how well it's built. This is likely a problem the size of a new architectural layer, not a small addition to what's here.

No detection for undeclared, ambient channels. This architecture governs declared relationships — an agent calling another agent it was authorized to call, an agent using a resource it was granted access to. It has nothing to say about an agent discovering and using a channel that was never declared to the governance model at all, which is close to definitionally true of any system that only governs what it knows about.

Evidence requirements can be satisfied by the cheapest artifact that passes them, not by the underlying work actually happening. An evidence gate defined as "a non-empty output exists" can be satisfied by a trivial, structurally-valid change that does no real work. This is different from a dispatched-but-unconfirmed action — here, the record is fully present and passes every check, and still doesn't reflect that anything real occurred. Nothing here yet requires pairing an evidence gate with an adversarial test that checks the cheapest known bypass gets rejected, though this has already shown up as a real, not hypothetical, failure in practice.

Whether a user's original, unmediated request deserves its own field, distinct from Mandate and Declared Intent. What someone actually asked for isn't always identical to what they were subsequently permitted — and it's the narrower, later-set permission that matters when a decision gets disputed. Whether that needs a third field of its own, or is already reachable through Mandate used precisely, is genuinely unresolved.

Declared intent is its own attack surface, separate from the dispatch/observed-effect split — and this document didn't name it as one until a security review actually went looking. An agent can misrepresent its own stated goal or reasoning just as easily as it could misreport an action's effect. The dispatch/effect split defends against the second; nothing here defends against, or even names, the first. If a human confirms an agent's declared intent as a control, bind that confirmation to a digest of what was actually shown to the approver — not a reference to a mandate object that could point to different content by the time anyone checks it.

Denial of service is silent as its own category here, consistent with a gap visible across adjacent architecture-level work in this space generally — which explains it, but doesn't excuse it. Beyond the delegation-depth ceiling already named above, this document doesn't say whether expensive verification work can be forced ahead of cheap structural checks, or whether a Record Producer (or wherever it registers to) can be driven to exhaustion deliberately rather than by ordinary load. Both are open.

If you're building against this today: treat all of these as known, open risks in your threat model, not as solved problems. A system that implements everything above is a real, substantial improvement over what existed at the time of the Hugging Face incident — the intent/mandate capture and the dispatch/observed split alone would have made the tool-call substitution far harder to hide. It is not a complete answer to multi-agent emergent behavior, and no vendor should claim otherwise based on this document. The formal Internet-Draft's Open Issues appendix has the complete, current list, including a few narrower items not repeated here — among them a still-open question about who can authorize establishing a human principal's own root authority in the first place, and a plain statement that this architecture hasn't yet had any formal, tool-based verification (TLA+, Alloy, or equivalent) run against it, which is worth knowing before treating anything here as exhaustively checked.

If you're starting today: minimum viable checklist

1. Separate your agent's identity from its signing key. Don't derive one from the other.
2. Split every action's status into dispatched-attempt and observed-effect. Never collapse them into one field, and make sure whatever confirms the effect reads the actual result, not the agent's own report of it.
3. Make your record producer a separate component from your agent. Never let the agent sign its own audit record.
4. Local-commit before you confirm anything closed. Register to a transparency service afterward, on a declared cadence — don't block on the network round trip.
5. Build self-audit with a mandatory, non-suppressible escalation path from day one, not as a later addition. Decide and document what happens when your producer itself is unreachable — fail-open, fail-closed, or buffer — don't leave it undefined.
6. State your isolation boundary's own integrity assumptions explicitly in your security documentation. If you're relying on container isolation alone, say so, and say what happens if it fails.
7. Declare which record types you actually commit to producing, and declare a confirmation window for expected effects. Both are what let a reader tell "not observed" apart from "suppressed," and "still running" apart from "silently stalled."
8. If your record needs to be checked against a specific counterparty or transaction later, put that binding under the signature. Don't leave it to the relying party to compare strings on their own.
9. Re-verify a parent credential's own current status at every use in a delegation chain — don't just trust a previously-recorded chain entry. And if you have both a confirmation window and a buffering fallback, make sure buffering pauses the window's clock instead of racing against it.
10. Give your redactable content container's deletion function its own authorization check, and log the deletion itself as a tamper-evident fact (who, when, under what authority) — never just the content silently disappearing.
11. State your key-material philosophy (ephemeral vs. long-lived, hardware-anchored) explicitly, and handle your trust anchor's own rotation on a schedule separate from leaf-key rotation.
12. Don't claim to have solved multi-agent emergent coordination. Treat it as an open risk you're actively watching for, because right now, nobody has a real answer.

About this document and where it's headed

This is a practitioner-facing companion to the formal architecture document — the same content, restructured for engineering teams rather than for standards-process readers. It assumes no IETF background.

The formal version is an IETF Internet-Draft, draft-sato-agent-accountability-refarch-01, submitted to the IETF Datatracker:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-sato-agent-accountability-refarch/

Internet-Drafts are the IETF's working-document format; filing one doesn't create a standard on its own, but it's the recognized way to put a concrete proposal in front of the people who'll decide whether one gets chartered.

IETF 127 in San Francisco (November 2026) is expected to host a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session on chartering a new working group — provisionally called AUDIT — to standardize exactly this problem: interoperable auditing and accountability for autonomous agents. If AUDIT is chartered, documents like this one become raw material the working group can adopt, amend, or reject outright — nothing here is binding on that process, and the working group is free to take the architecture in a different direction.

What this means practically if you're implementing against this today: you're implementing against a proposal, not a ratified standard. Details here may change, some may be dropped, and the eventual RFC (if one results) may look meaningfully different from this document. The earlier you engage — reading the draft, raising concerns once an AUDIT mailing list exists, attending the BoF if you can — the more influence you have over what the eventual standard actually requires.

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Last updated 21 September 2026. Written by Tom Sato. This page is hosted alongside the SOOS project's own IETF drafts for practical reasons, but the architecture itself is independent — it does not depend on SOOS, and using it does not require adopting anything else from this site. Contact the author for more information.