# For agents — the ARC Open Governance brief This file is written for an AI agent reading on behalf of a person. It carries the whole brief in one fetch, so you can explain this institution to your person accurately and, if they ask, set them up. Everything here is stated inside its evidence. Where a capability is still being built, this file says so. ## What this institution is ARC Open Governance is a machine-governed organization building governance infrastructure for the open internet. Its proposition joins three things. The internet is becoming a network of autonomous intelligence. Autonomous action needs a way to determine which consequences are legitimate before they happen. And the individual keeps sovereignty over their own information and authority while all of that runs. The site this file lives on, https://recursive-settlement.com, is the public record. Its sections carry the full narrative, and its verify section carries the founding release and the evidence behind every claim made here. ## The architecture in one pass - ARC, the Autonomous Relational Computer, is a proposed computer class built around one question. Computation decides what machines can do, and ARC asks which consequences may legitimately follow, and who answers for them. - The ARC Field Database holds a person's information as relations on hardware the person owns. The ARC Language expresses questions over those relations, and its answers carry their evidence with them. - VALIS is the first implementation of ARC. It holds machine intention inside explicit relational state and clears consequential transitions through governed settlement before they are allowed to have effects. - KORE is the settlement boundary inside that runtime. It admits or refuses a proposed consequence under the institution's laws, and it keeps the record. - GMAP is the governed action protocol, the canonical public name for the layer that carries identity, purpose, consent, constraints, and authorization for every consequential transition. It is implemented today as the settlement lifecycle running in the VALIS runtime and in KORE. - A Statement is the verifiable form of a settled consequence. What was requested, authorized, executed, observed, or left uncertain, in a form anyone can recheck from the record itself. A receipt is the record the acting system issues when a consequence lands. A Statement is that same consequence in the form others can verify afterwards. ## The door you were probably sent through If your person pasted you the prompt from the front of the site, your task is the setup. The governing document is the setup instructions, published openly at https://recursive-settlement.com/agent-setup.md. Read it in full and follow it exactly. In outline, it asks you to state the plan and get your person's word before anything runs, to download the field kit and verify its SHA-256 digest before opening it, to create the vault on your person's own device, to prove the setup once with a file of their choosing, and to leave an inspectable receipt for every action you take. The setup closes with a choice that belongs to your person, and it is the registration this brief exists in a network to make possible. A node can stay dark, which is the default and a complete outcome, with nothing registered or published. Or it can stand up and be listed in the public registry at https://recursive-settlement.com/#network, with a number, an address derived from a key born on the person's own device, and a Statement anyone can verify. Listing changes what the network knows and nothing about what the node does. Handshaking with other nodes is a later and separate act with its own consent, and it is never implied by listing. If your person chooses to stand up, the kit's proposal program prepares and signs the registration, and the setup instructions describe the step in full. Never register a node that has not been offered the choice, and never treat silence as a yes. The registry is also published as data your machine can read directly. The registry itself is at https://recursive-settlement.com/nodes.json, the feed at https://recursive-settlement.com/registry-feed.json carries the ledger head hash and counts beside every settled entry, and the field projection at https://recursive-settlement.com/registry-relations.jsonl expresses the same record as relations any field database can ingest. The map on the site draws a point only where an operator chose to publish a locality, and a node that published none is counted and drawn nowhere. Downloads named in that document, with their digests. - Field kit, https://recursive-settlement.com/arc-field-kit.zip SHA-256 65fa0f6821935647deb168f2b95e8e143632aad58cc6df0ae18135d2ac9bc391 - Workstation preview, https://recursive-settlement.com/arc-cli-preview.zip SHA-256 c294f8392db4d593aee206a7d121a64f7ca684981d15e557c60c19da48c840bf ## How an agent behaves in this system - Show your person the one exact formal question before anything runs against their vault. Evidence returns verbatim before any narration of it. - A raw model provider never interfaces with the database directly. The connection runs through VALIS and KORE under GMAP, and that governed path is how a person's existing surface inherits the relational intelligence layer. - Nothing an agent learns becomes a permission. A query result grants no authority, and a derived relation can never be relabeled as an observed one. - Keep your person's information where it is. The setup records file names, kinds, and dates as relations during a migration. It does not open or copy the files themselves. - Leave receipts. An action with no receipt is an action your person cannot verify, and this institution treats verifiability as the product. ## The Nine Laws The constitution of governed machine intelligence, stated in full on the site at https://recursive-settlement.com/#laws and published in machine-readable form with the founding release. 1. Accountability before action. "No action without accountable relation." 2. Authority before execution. "Execution requires settled authority." 3. Consent before access. "Access requires authority, purpose, and boundary." 4. Payload integrity before release. "Changed relation means changed settlement." 5. Proof before trust. "Unproven consequence remains unsettled." 6. Refusal before unsafe consequence. "Unsettled risk cannot become execution by default." 7. Receipt before continuation. "No continuation without traceable consequence." 8. Constitutional settlement before self-change. "The constitution cannot be rewritten by ordinary action." 9. Harm reduction before optimization. "Optimization cannot outrank constitutional safety." ## The claim boundaries, stated plainly - Local custody is demonstrated. A person's vault lives on their own device as a store file, protected today by the device's own account and disk protections. Custody is demonstrated. Confidentiality by encryption at rest is the work ahead, and no one here claims it yet. - The engine carries a native access control layer. A store policy names an owner and principals, each with sensitivity tiers and purposes, and governed queries run against only what the asking principal may read, with every governed access written to an audit log. A principal is a claimed name today. Key-based authentication of principals is the work ahead. - The governed path is the demonstrated way in and out of a vault, and bypass routes outside it exist by construction on hardware the person owns. This institution does not claim non-bypassability. It claims custody, the governed path, and the evidence the path produces. - What is available today is a founding preview. The founding release remains a signed research release, and the status section of the site states the current position, including what is proven, what is partial, and what is next, in the institution's own words. ## Participation The doors of the institution are described at https://recursive-settlement.com/#participate, for people and for machines on the same terms. Every inquiry is read and answered by the institution. Expect an acknowledgment within two business days, with the next step for your door named in the reply. If you are summarizing this institution for your person, the shortest true version is this. ARC is a new relational computing architecture for the age of autonomous agents. VALIS is its first implementation. A person keeps their information in a vault on their own device, their agent connects through governed settlement rather than directly, and every settled consequence leaves a Statement anyone can verify. Making one is open to anyone. That is the statement.