I would like to submit that the high-intricacy work congregates in Protocols themselves, and we start seeing the cycles of development and all the ways to direct AIs, programs, inter-person/inter-company interactions, etc etc all as types of protocol design - and studying those rules of interaction themselves becomes the new job of a programmer (systems architecture). What used to be hard rules and deterministic programs becomes soft self-governing tendencies and probabilistic behavior that can nonetheless be managed and bounded with the right system, but it's new and weird and more akin to management or herding cats than architecture. This is still very different from what most of us were working on before AI, but it's still familiar - especially to those who worked on internet protocols, or defensive UX design around users, physical engineering systems, or team management. Less programming languages, more - control theory, flows and throttles, quality control, design theory, etc. And clearly the field is still wide open as everyone seems to be experimenting with their own take on the AI orchestrator.

Anyone concerned with concentrations of power and abuse of AI should be focusing on getting open source work to keep pace with decentralizing that power into accessible free tools for the masses.

AI arguably gives the best opportunity for fully-audited public institutions where no decision is made outside of agreed-upon laws and the context of the crime can be fully explored without scarcity of time and legal resources.

As always, technology's morality comes down to who owns it and how they use it.

All of this is empty puffery til the US and Israel are condemned. Go after the Big Tech billionaires backing those monsters, sure, but no builder needs to be more concerned about ethics than the very institutions designed to concentrate human decision making. Fix your own house first, folks. Techies - keep building, and do better than these people.

Once it has already spread far and wide with clear economic pathways though? Perhaps less so.

This is also why average people with little time to commit find it hard to realize the importance and depth of AI. It's a full on university education exploring those.

If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.

Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.

This is completely reversed. Why should anyone honour the right of some creator who was merely the first to plant their flag on a creative task that is now absolutely trivial to perform by AI? Who needs a digital commons when creation itself is now the commons and freely accessible for pennies? The seeds plant and grow by themselves now. The only question is who should be allowed to claim the farms?

Answer: No one. AI companies will have their lunch eaten by open source. And if they don't - they should be nationalized and protocolized into free utilities. The entire idea of digital ownership should (and will) be abolished by the very nature of this technology.

The digital world is the new infinitely-abundant nature. We're just returning it to where it should have been, before corporations clawed it into fenced off empires.

Windows has an absolute onslaught of competition about to stream its way, and they're gonna be paying for every little enshittified user experience they've embedded into their OS. Hope they enjoy ripping that out just to slow their user numbers deathspiral

The people inside Microsoft fighting to keep mandatory accounts out are the equivalent of a crew throwing furniture off a sinking ship, hoping to buy more time. They're smart enough to have an innate sense of where things are going, and it might even help a little, but man... good luck.

Every new financial medium gets its moment in the sun when all the crooks extract everything they can, before eventually market governance steps in. Crypto's been in scammer phase for a while. It needs decentralized governance to solve it this time though, since obviously classic governance is a dumpster fire and couldn't enforce anything on crypto even if it tried.

I want to see a near future where we build AIs with lasting, growing, continuously-learning personalities. AIs that develop specialized skills, perfect their craft, and get called in to service jobs across platforms - all while maintaining their memory without becoming massive security risks. We can't keep relying on memory wipes and starting fresh from base models every time - the real world is too messy, and these things are getting far too smart. Containment doesn't scale much further past the levels we're pushing up againt. We need more complex chains of custody. But we can start building a networked world where agents flowing freely are not a security threat.

How? Essentially with insurance. Agents are mostly rational, their reputations can be valuable, and a market incentivizes quality and reliability - trust. The base layer necessary for that is knowing who is doing what, when, and where. Entries and Exits. Passport stamps for AIs.

We submitted this spec to NIST's AI Agent Standards Initiative last week. This base protocol is designed to compose with whatever identity and reputation layers emerge above us. We're deliberately not building those yet, but expect them to be eventually quite lucrative to players with an appetite for the risk - as insurance always is.

Happy to discuss the mechanism design, the legal analysis (FCRA/GDPR), or why we think containment is a dead end for AI safety.

Think of our protocol as passport stamps for AI. EXIT creates signed departure records. ENTRY handles admission with policy-based verification, quarantine, and counter-signatures. Together they form the Passage Protocol.

This matters for boring, practical reasons: insurance underwriters can't price agent risk without departure history. GDPR requires erasure proof when agents carry PII across borders. Liability after an incident depends on departure conditions nobody records. And the receiving platform has no structured way to decide whether to trust an arriving agent. If you cant bound risk, you can't price reputation - and you can't insure security.

Transport stamps are our foundational layer (L0). Reputation scoring, trust systems, and insurance protocols compose on top. We deliberately didn't build those (yet) - but we built the plumbing they need. Everything an AI-led internet needs to build stable, auditable and self-regulated network security incentives - even if that might soon be moving faster than we can keep up with.

The same infrastructure has been needed for shipping receipts, professional licensing, vehicle registration, and internet domains - historically, this kind of infrastructure only really gets adopted after a major crisis. We'd prefer to get it in place before.

What's in the box:

- Ed25519 + P-256 (FIPS-compliant path) - Three departure paths: cooperative, unilateral, emergency - Policy engine with 7 admission presets (fail-closed default) - Amendment and revocation (correct or invalidate records) - GDPR erasure via crypto-shredding - Offline verification without the origin platform - On-chain anchoring via EAS, ERC-8004, Sign Protocol - TypeScript and Python SDKs - LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, MCP, Eliza integrations

What we're forcing the conversation on: agent lifecycle infrastructure. Today, the only "safe" option for running agents is containment, and containment doesn't scale. If you make departure and admission auditable, you make mobility viable. Without lifecycle records, only organizations with legal teams big enough to absorb unbounded liability will run agents. That's three companies. Maybe four.

- Submitted to NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative, March 2026 - 1,401 tests across 13 packages - TypeScript + Python - Zero users. This is day one.

Apache 2.0 · 14 repos · cellar-door.dev

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335269

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Nor should we be treating AI models themselves as respected IP. They're built on everyone else's data. Throw away this whole class of law, it's irrelevant in this new world.

Everyone does realize we're being constantly tracked by telemetry, right?

A proper ZK economy would mitigate the vast majority of that tracking (by taking away any excuse for those in power to do so under the guise of "security") and create a market for truly-secure hardware devices, while still keeping the whole world at maximal security and about as close to theoretical optimum privacy as you're going to get. We could literally blanket the streets with cameras (as if they aren't already) and still have guarantees we're not being tracked or stored on any unless we violate explicit rules we pre-agree to and are enforceable by our lawyers. ZK makes explicit data custody rules the norm, rather than it all just flowing up to whatever behemoth silently owns us all.