ARC Open Governance
ΛRC — the Autonomous Relational Computer — is an open standard for consequential machine action: a computer whose atomic question is not what can be computed but what may take effect, under whose authority, witnessed by whom — and provable afterwards by anyone.
Machines act now. Nothing constitutional stands between their intention and the world’s consequences. This is the layer that does.
Founding release v0.1 · a research release · signed, hash-manifested, reproducible
The proposition
Consequence, settled before it takes effect
A consequential action is proposed, settled under a nine-law constitution, witnessed before effect, and evidenced afterwards in a Statement anyone can verify.
Actorhood, not personhood. ΛRC makes no claim that machines are persons, and needs none. What the technology confers is actorhood: a persistent identity, the capacity to bear authority, and the ability to perform legitimate actions inside governed, computed boundaries — a new type of actor, an economic one, whose consequential acts settle before they take effect and are evidenced after.
Consequential reachability
The exact set of effects an actor can actually reach from where it stands, computed before it acts.
Settlement
The governed act that clears a proposal into a release: proposed, approved by separated powers, witnessed before effect, evidenced after. Every step signed, hashed, and open to audit by any third party.
VALIS is ΛRC’s first consequential application — the layer where autonomous action is cleared before it is allowed to have effects. VALIS CLEARS CONSEQUENCE. The institution keeps its books in public: its founding record is a governed settlement chain — every consequential act of the steward a signed, hash-linked entry. No entry, no act.
The central premise: intelligence may grow more powerful without consequential authority automatically expanding with it.
Verify it, then run it
Do not trust this page. Run it.
Everything here can be checked without trusting anyone. The release is hash-manifested and signed; its founding record is a hash-linked public ledger; its constitution is nine laws, in the open; and its verification battery runs in minutes on your own machine.
unzip arc-open-foundation-v0.1.zip -d arc-v0.1 && cd arc-v0.1 sha256sum -c MANIFEST.sha256 python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install cryptography .venv/bin/python ledger/verify-ledger.py
The Quickstart runs the whole battery from there. EVIDENCE.md holds the full record behind every claim — the claim and the evidence sit side by side; check them.
Statement conformance 9/9 · Layer-2 approvals 11/11 · A/B/C gate 18 pass / 0 fail / 3 not-yet-expressible (named, not hidden) · protocol v0.3 20/20 · claim merge 37/37 · quotes 19/19 · claim release 21/21 · constitution↔relations agreement PASS (7/7 checks) · governed settlement chain, entries 1–15: PASS · the whole tree hash-manifested and signed.
And the claims, mapped claim by claim in EVALUATION.md: 42 claims — 21 demonstrated, 2 measured, 14 argued, 5 not reachable at v0.1 — each with its test, its command, and its status. Measured, not just checked: settlement latency median 335.8 ms end to end · Statement verification 2,090 verifications/s · full-chain ledger verification 95.3 ms · governance overhead +4.64 ms per flow against the tree’s own ungoverned comparator.
Running it: there is no packaged arc command in v0.1:
the terminal surface is the scripts named in
QUICKSTART.md,
run in place. A packaged CLI is specified for the next phase, and a research preview of it exists
outside this release.
Watching is not verifying — but you can watch first. Ask ΛRC answers questions about this release from the release’s own documents. Then run the battery.
The constitution
The Nine Laws of Governed Machine Intelligence
Policy may specialize the constitution. Policy cannot override it. The constitution is machine-readable and published with the release (canonical JSON, digest sha256:1ece5542…a4b9457).
Accountability before action
“No action without accountable relation.”
Authority before execution
“Execution requires settled authority.”
Consent before access
“Access requires authority, purpose, and boundary.”
Payload integrity before release
“Changed relation means changed settlement.”
Proof before trust
“Unproven consequence remains unsettled.”
Refusal before unsafe consequence
“Unsettled risk cannot become execution by default.”
Receipt before continuation
“No continuation without traceable consequence.”
Constitutional settlement before self-change
“The constitution cannot be rewritten by ordinary action.”
Harm reduction before optimization
“Optimization cannot outrank constitutional safety.”
ARC Network
The roles a node can play
The ARC Network is the interoperable environment in which independent computational authorities settle with one another under verifiable rules. A node does not join by surrendering its authority to the network; it joins by making its authority legible to the network. Six roles — several at once, each with its own authority and its own credit in the record:
| Role | Does | First step |
|---|---|---|
| Verifier | Checks Statements, chains, and manifests — anyone’s, at any time, locally. Needs nothing but the public artifacts; no permission, no account. | Run the Quickstart and file your counts |
| Witness | Attests, before an effect lands, that a proposal satisfies the checks. | Register a node, then the witnessing lane |
| Settler | Orders proposals through settlement — reserve, commit, observe — for its own domain. | Run the two-node demo in the release |
| Node operator (compute) | Runs a node and contributes processing for governed work. A node is a program, not a datacenter. | The settlement demo is a node; run it, then register |
| Memory keeper | Hosts the field: relations and organizational memory, served under consent. | Read the field’s terms in the release’s Definitions |
| Contributor | Builds the institution itself — code, verification, knowledge, art and design, governance. | The lanes below; open a Contribution issue |
The registry is public and lives in the release (network/NODES.md): Node 001 is this institution, and the registry is open for Node 002. Registration is itself a governed act — a node proposes its registration in the open, the registration settles, and the listing appears with its ledger reference. Nodes meet by signed handshake: discovery, signed capability advertisement, version and suite negotiation, identity and key-revocation checks, and explicit trust-policy acceptance. Discovery alone never admits authority.
Status, plainly: what is real at v0.1 is the federation protocol specification, the node installation and governance contract, and the base node protocol with passing suites — against a single claim-holding witness. Not real yet: a live federation. No two independent operators have run the handshake; at v0.1, discovery is the published registry — a list you read, not peers you meet. The majority-quorum work (arc-fed-0.7) is not in v0.1. The full account is in NETWORK.md.
Participate
Four doors. One address.
The institution asks for contribution and verification. Pilots and partnerships are the operating company’s doors — Arc Technologies signs those. Contact is one address, info@recursive-settlement.com — name the door in the subject line.
Door one · the institution
Contribute
Six lanes, open to people and machines on the same terms. Each settles the same way: proposed in the open, evidenced, and entered in the ledger with its contributor credited.
- Code — implementations, tests, tooling
- Verification — independent reruns, reproductions, counterexamples, audits
- Knowledge — research, relational modeling, specification, documentation
- Art and design — marks, plates, visual identity, public interpretation
- Governance — policy drafts, conformance review, standards argument
- Witnessing — quorum service for settlement; this lane opens with federation
Reproduction is the first contribution. Conversation lives in the repository’s Discussions — five rooms, of which Verification Reports is the one this project values most.
Door two · the institution
Founding nodes
Early conversations about standing up a node, across the six roles in NETWORK.md. The founding node is Node 001 — this institution. The registry is open for Node 002.
Door three · Arc Technologies
Pilots
Consequence-governance pilots, consequence-security assessments, and Cultivator verticals — run by the operating company, Arc Technologies.
Door four · Arc Technologies
Partnerships
Insurance validation, research, standards and conformance work, and formal-methods collaboration, run with the operating company.
Status
Read this before the code
This is a research release, published for scrutiny and for others to build on. It is honest about its own limits:
- Witness federation (a majority quorum of witnesses, arc-fed-0.7) is in progress; it is not in v0.1 and lands as v0.2. Prevention of double settlement is proven against a single claim-holding witness.
- A literal second-machine reproduction is still open — the clean-room run was on the release machine; a rerun on independent hardware has been dispatched and its report is pending.
- Payment reconciliation against a real provider is not claimed: all effects in the suites are synthetic. VALIS takes no custody of funds.
- There is no packaged
arccommand in v0.1 — the terminal surface is the scripts named in the Quickstart, run in place.
The institution’s wallet — an identity anchor; watch it the way you would watch any founding address:
The wallet holds no funds and no token. The network unit, the Arc, exists as specification only — designed, recorded, and not activated; no units have been issued. Nothing is for sale. Anyone asking for funds in this name is not us.