Sovereign Attestation Protocol

Preamble

An AI system that cannot account for its own decisions is not a governed system — it is an oracle with no auditor.

An AI system that depends on a cloud provider for its continued operation is not a sovereign system — it is a tenant.

SAP v1.0 defines the minimum criteria that must be satisfied before an AI system can truthfully claim to operate under sovereign governance.

These criteria are not aspirational. They describe a system that either works or does not. Every requirement is binary: met or not met. There are no partial credits.

SnapKitty OS is the reference implementation. Every requirement listed here is live in production on bare metal as of the publication date above.

Core Requirements

SAP-1 Agent Identity

Every agent in the system must possess a persistent cryptographic identity.

• Each agent must have a unique key pair generated at provisioning time
• The public key must be registered in a discoverable, tamper-evident registry
• Every output produced by the agent must carry a signature verifiable against the registered public key
• Key rotation must produce a new registry entry — old entries must not be deleted

SAP-2 Immutable Decision Ledger

Every consequential decision made by any agent must be recorded in an append-only ledger.

• The ledger must be append-only — no entry may be modified or deleted after creation
• Each entry must carry: agent identity, decision payload, cryptographic seal, and a monotonically increasing index
• The chain integrity must be verifiable at any time by replaying entries from index 0
• The ledger must survive a restart of all agent processes — persistence is mandatory

SAP-3 Constitutional Governance

Agent behavior must be governed by a constitutional document — not configuration, not environment variables, not code comments.

• A plain-language document must define the behavioral constraints of all agents in the system
• This document must be referenced in agent system prompts at runtime — it must be active, not advisory
• Modifications to the constitutional document must require a ledger entry (SAP-2)
• The document must be stored in the repository under version control

SAP-4 Consensus Threshold

Decisions that affect system state must require agreement from more than one agent.

• A minimum quorum of three agents must participate in any decision that changes persistent state
• The consensus threshold must be declared explicitly (e.g., 5-of-7)
• Each participating agent's vote must be independently signed (SAP-1)
• The consensus event must be recorded in the ledger (SAP-2) with all participating signatures

SAP-5 Hardware Independence

The system must be capable of operating without dependency on any third-party cloud service for its core functions.

• Agent inference must be operable on locally-hosted models
• The ledger must be storable on locally-owned storage
• The system must be deployable to hardware owned or leased by the operating organization
• Cloud services may be used as optional enhancements — they must not be required for the system to function

SAP-6 Adversarial Resilience

The system must implement active defenses against unauthorized access and data exfiltration.

• Credential exposure must trigger automatic rotation
• Unauthorized scraping or probing must be detected and actively responded to — passive logging alone does not satisfy this requirement
• Canary tokens must be deployed such that credential reuse from unauthorized parties produces a detectable signal
• All adversarial events must be recorded in the ledger (SAP-2)

Conformance Levels

SnapKitty OS operates at Level 3 as of 2026-05-27.

How the Field Scores

As of ratification date. Based on publicly available information and deployed capabilities.

? = insufficient public information to assess. ✗ = not met based on public information. This table is updated as systems evolve — open a GitHub issue to request a re-evaluation.

Self-Certification

Any organization may self-certify against SAP v1.0 at no cost.

1. Complete the machine-readable checklist: SAP-v1.0.json
2. Publish the completed checklist in your repository
3. Link to this page as the standard you are conforming to
4. Commit the checklist — the git SHA is your certification timestamp

Self-certification is a declaration of conformance. It is not audited by SnapKitty unless you request a formal review.

Third-Party Certification

Organizations seeking formal certification from SnapKitty OS receive:

• A signed certification artifact (Ed25519, issued by SnapKitty OS)
• A permanent ledger entry proving the date and scope of certification
• Permission to display the SAP certification mark

Third-party certification is free during the founding period (2026). See specs/CERTIFICATION.md for how to request a review.

What SAP Does Not Cover

SAP v1.0 does not specify: programming language or runtime, specific agent frameworks or model providers, token economics or incentive structures, agent count or topology, or UI requirements.

SAP is a floor, not a ceiling. A system can satisfy SAP v1.0 and still be deeply inadequate in ways outside this specification's scope.

Relation to Other Standards

None of the above require agent identity, immutable decision ledgers, or hardware independence. SAP v1.0 fills that gap.

Chain Seal

The filing order matters. The git SHA is the timestamp. Immutable. Public. Forever.