We just submitted the spec to the IETF

So here’s the news, and it’s the big one for this whole project: this week I submitted draft-howlett-aigcsep-00 — the real technical specification behind everything you’re reading on this site — to the IETF. Internet-Draft, submission ID 164062, sitting in the queue waiting on the secretariat to post it to the public datatracker. (Standards bodies move at standards-body speed — no fixed timeline, they just tell you “it always takes a bit longer than you’d think.” I’ll swap in the official link the second the page goes live.)

Why now, and why does any of this matter to you?

Because right as I was finishing the draft, two of the biggest AI labs on the planet stood up and had exactly the argument I started writing this thing to get past. Anthropic put out a public call for a coordinated pause on frontier AI development — citing the real risk of losing the ability to oversee systems that can improve themselves faster than we can watch them do it. OpenAI’s answer, more or less: that’s not a lab’s call to make, governments should be the ones deciding.

Both of those are real positions, held by serious people. Neither one is actually a plan.

“Pause” doesn’t tell you what happens the morning after the pause ends — and somebody always restarts first. “Let governments decide” doesn’t tell you which government, on what timeline, enforced how, or — the part that actually keeps me up — what an autonomous agent is supposed to do in the meantime when it needs to discover a service, spend a few dollars on your behalf, or prove to a stranger’s system that it’s acting for you and not against you.

AIGCSEP — The Covenant — is my answer to the engineering question sitting underneath that whole argument. Not “should AI be allowed to keep building.” How do you build the substrate it builds on top of so that it can, safely, with the receipts to prove it, every time? Three planes kept structurally apart so a failure in one can’t cascade into the others. A vault, so the agent never holds the keys — only the standing to ask for what it needs, when it needs it. A badge that gets checked at every gate, so participation is visible and standing is something that can actually be revoked. And for anyone who breaks the compact: not a kill switch aimed at them — just a silo. The market quietly stops doing business with you. That’s not a pause button. That’s not a committee that meets next quarter. That’s a mechanism — written down, specified, and now sitting inside the actual standards process that quietly runs half the infrastructure you use every day without ever thinking about it.

That’s what’s in the draft. That’s what the rest of this site is trying to say five different ways, in five different vocabularies — because not everybody’s brain takes an argument the same way mine does, and this one’s too important to only land with people who think like me.

I’ve been doing this — software, systems, architecture — for thirty-plus years now, and I’ve watched a lot of “this changes everything” moments come and go without much actually changing. This one’s different. I think the people standing closest to it know that too — that’s why you’re watching them argue in public about what to do next instead of just quietly shipping. That argument needed a third option sitting on the table, in writing, moving through review where anyone can watch it happen.

So here it is. Submitted. In the queue. Real.

More to come as it moves — and there’s a lot more coming.

— J.P.