Standards
A standards-development agenda for the authority layer. No ARENOMICS standard yet exists. The six families below are the intended first programme of work; each is meant to become a versioned public document.
Professional standards · development programme
Mandate Standard
What a valid machine mandate must contain: scope, principal, prohibited actions, budget, reporting frequency, evidence requirements, revocation triggers.
PlannedDelegation Standard
How authority propagates between humans, agents and sub-agents; how it attenuates with each hop; when a delegated mandate must fail closed.
PlannedEvidence Standard
What evidence an autonomous system must emit for its work to be verifiable by an independent party, and in what form an auditor, insurer or regulator can consume it.
PlannedRevocation Standard
When and how machine authority can be suspended or terminated; who may do it; what must be logged; what happens to work in flight.
PlannedSynthetic Enterprise Standard
Minimum governance structure for organisations with persistent autonomous agents: designated authority, intervention budget, correlated-failure planning, disclosure.
PlannedAgent Authority Record
A future machine-readable record of an agent's mandate, scope, identity and revocation state — the artefact the other five standards would reference.
PlannedRelationship to existing standards
Active work already exists that these families would build on rather than replace: identity and credential mechanisms for agents at the IETF; the Cloud Security Alliance's agentic identity governance framework; NIST's AI Agent Standards Initiative and its identity-and-authorisation concept paper; ISO/IEC 42001 for AI management systems; the NIST AI Risk Management Framework; and MLCommons' agent-reliability evaluation work. The Institute intends to contribute to these bodies and to seek mutual recognition, not to publish competing frameworks.
Why a standards agenda now
The standard-setting body for AI risk and reliability benchmarks states that no previous experience or education is required to join it. A field whose standards work has no entry qualification is a field without a profession. The Institute reads that as evidence for a first mover with a credible institution, and as a reason to publish standards as versioned, criticisable documents rather than as marketing.
Contributions and objections are welcome at research@arenomics.institute.