Government & regulators
Governing agentic AI requires machine-readable standards, not policy documents alone. SOOS provides the technical infrastructure that turns regulatory intent into enforceable agent behavior.
This page explains what SOOS is, why it matters for government and regulatory bodies, and how to engage.
The problem governments face
Autonomous AI agents are being deployed across consequential domains — financial services, healthcare, legal processes, public administration — without a shared technical standard for how they operate, what they are permitted to do, and how their actions are recorded.
Policy frameworks and guidelines exist. What is missing is the technical layer that makes those frameworks enforceable at runtime — in the software itself, not just in the documentation.
SOOS fills that gap.
What SOOS provides
Compliance built into the agent, not bolted on afterward. SOOS specifies how jurisdiction-specific legal requirements — data protection law, financial regulation, sector-specific mandates — are encoded as machine-readable records that compile automatically into agent policy when the system starts. Compliance is not a separate audit step. It is part of how the agent runs.
A complete, tamper-evident record of what every agent did. Every governed agent session produces a structured audit trail — what the agent was authorized to do, what it actually did, what it decided at each step, and what state it left resources in. This record is designed to satisfy regulatory review, legal discovery, and independent audit without requiring additional instrumentation.
Human authority is always reachable. SOOS specifies a mandatory escalation protocol — the technical standard for how an agent pauses and transfers control to a human when it reaches the boundary of its authorization. Autonomous operation does not mean unchecked operation. Human oversight is built into the standard, not left to implementation discretion.
Hard limits that cannot be bypassed by instruction. SOOS specifies a prohibition layer — a set of behaviors that a governed agent must never perform, regardless of what it is instructed to do. These limits are machine-readable and kernel-enforced. They cannot be overridden at the application layer.
Who is responsible
Every agent action in a SOOS-governed system traces to a human principal — the person or organization that authorized the action. The chain of authorization is signed, time-stamped, and recorded. When something goes wrong, the responsible party is identifiable from the record.
Autonomous does not mean anonymous. SOOS makes agent accountability technically enforceable, not just a policy aspiration.
Open and free to use
SOOS is published as open IETF Internet-Drafts under a free, permissive licence. This means:
- Any government, regulator, or organization can read, implement, and build on SOOS at no cost
- No vendor controls the standard — it is developed through the open IETF process with public participation
- Implementations can be independently verified against the published specification
- There is no commercial version and no licensing fee
Governments and regulators can adopt SOOS as a reference standard for procurement, certification, or regulatory guidance without any dependency on a private company.
How to engage
Review the technical specifications. All twelve SOOS Internet-Drafts are publicly available at soosproject.ai/drafts. Each draft includes the full specification text and links to the IETF Datatracker.
Understand the gap analysis. The gap analysis documents the specific technical gaps in the current landscape that SOOS addresses. It is written for a technical audience but the gap descriptions are accessible to policy readers.
Participate in the IETF process. SOOS drafts are developed through the Internet Engineering Task Force — the international body that produces the technical standards underpinning the internet. IETF participation is open to anyone. SOOS will be presented at IETF 126 in Vienna, July 18–24, 2026.
Contact us. For government and regulatory enquiries, use the contact information on the about page.
All SOOS specifications are published as IETF Internet-Drafts and are free to use, implement, and build upon.