Authority Decision Contract v0.1

The contract an AI agent uses to ask what it is allowed to do, and the shape of the answer it gets back: ALLOW, DENY, APPROVE or ESCALATE, with the applicable frameworks and a verifiable evidence record.

Le contrat de décision est ouvert. Implémentez-le, critiquez-le, étendez-le.

Published under the MIT license. The licence covers the specification documents only — the service implementing them is not open source.

Documents

/spec/authority-decision-v0.1.schema.jsonJSON Schema (2020-12) for the request and the response, including the evidence record.
/spec/openapi.jsonOpenAPI 3.1 covering decide, verify and the published keys.
/spec/LICENSEMIT, scoped to the specification artifacts.

Quickstart

No API key, no account. One request:

curl -s https://structureclerk.ca/api/v1/authority/decide \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "agent":   { "id": "financebot-01", "autonomy_level": 3 },
    "action":  { "type": "payment.execute", "amount": 12500,
                 "currency": "CAD", "data_categories": ["personal","health"] },
    "context": { "jurisdictions": ["QC"], "sector": "health" }
  }'

The response carries an evidence object. To check it independently, recompute the hash, verify the Ed25519 signature against the published key, then confirm its position in the ledger:

curl -s https://structureclerk.ca/api/v1/authority/verify/EVD-<uuid>

Design commitments

Decisions are advisory. StructureClerk decides, your infrastructure enforces. Nothing here blocks an agent.
Frameworks are cited at framework level — never invented article numbers.
An unrecognized action type escalates rather than being guessed at, and any confidence below 0.90 is routed to human review.
Organisation profiles may only increase human oversight, never reduce it.
Every decision is signed and appended to a chained log that a third party can replay.

Versioning

This is v0.1: the shape may still change. Additive fields will not break existing consumers, and any breaking change ships under a new version path. The engine reports which rule set produced a decision in rules_version.

Feedback, disagreement and competing implementations are all welcome: info@structureclerk.ca