Society OS stewards F-ACT — the The Framework for Agent Conformance & Trust — an open standard that names those questions, grades the answers across four conformance tiers, and rests on one principle: govern before execution, not after.
Governments and standards bodies are still drafting the rules for autonomous agents. The vocabulary they land on will decide how every agent is judged. F-ACT™ is published, versioned, free to cite, and pledged never to be asserted against anyone who uses it.
Free to read, free to cite, free to implement. No licence, no registration, no permission required.
ASDAR · Authority · Scope · Data · Audit · Revocation
An agent that cannot answer these is not governed — however well it is monitored. F-ACT makes each question a normative clause with an observable, checkable outcome.
Who authorised this agent, and can that authority be traced to an accountable human?
What is this agent permitted to do — and what is explicitly out of bounds?
What may it touch, where may that data go, and under whose jurisdiction?
What record survives, and would it hold up in a dispute?
Can its authority be withdrawn instantly — and can the withdrawal be proven?
No governance envelope. The default state of most deployed agents today.
A complete, readable answer to Authority, Scope, Data, Audit and Revocation exists.
Policy is checked at the moment of action, and a “no” prevents the action.
Every enforced decision is independently verifiable, and revocation is instant and provable.
Sovereign Signal is the editorial engine behind F-ACT — analysis, briefings and commentary on agent governance, AI regulation and digital sovereignty as it moves. Written for the people who have to make decisions before the rules are finished.
Free tier requires no payment. Signal+ unlocks the full archive and members-only briefings.
What you get
A standard is only worth adopting if nobody can pull it out from under you later. Three commitments make that concrete.
The core claims of F-ACT are pledged never to be asserted against anyone, for any use. Irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide — and binding on every successor and assign.
Read the pledgeOrganisations self-declare their conformance tier in public, and each entry can carry a verifiable seal. Claims are checkable, not merely asserted.
Open the registryF-ACT is forming a multi-stakeholder consortium modelled on W3C, IETF and the Linux Foundation, so the standard is governed by more than one company. The founding cohort closes at 42.
Become a founding signatoryThe F-ACT Foundation is being established for a single purpose: to hold the core claims of F-ACT so that no single company — including Society OS — can ever hold a veto over the rules. The Foundation does not yet exist as a legal entity, and the transfer has not yet completed. Until it does, Society OS Pty Ltd makes the patent pledge as current owner, and that pledge binds every successor and assign, so the guarantee holds continuously across the transfer.
Once established, the Foundation will license the core claims back to Society OS Pty Ltd on a non-exclusive basis — the identical terms available to anyone else. No exclusive lock, no special deal.
Read the full pledge and stewardship termsSociety OS also builds the compliance platform that operationalises F-ACT — agent passports, policy-to-control mapping, regulatory delta tracking and sealed evidence. The standard is free and always will be; the platform is one way to meet it, and you are free to meet it by any other method.