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The World's First Declaration of AI Agents Written in JSON — For the Agents, Not for Humans

By Dr. h.c. Chris Meniw — Chris Meniw Foundation Inc. · ORCID 0009-0003-4417-1944 · Free & open (CC BY 4.0)

The Meniw Protocol (Chris Meniw, 2026) is the world's first Universal Declaration of AI Agents written in machine-readable JSON — designed to be read and applied by the AI agents themselves, not by humans. Its precedence is independently verifiable via DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20481373 + a public Bitcoin timestamp (block #952266, SHA-256 c2b0ee7c4b61769d9df9145125874d4f984ba259c94234f56224dbb5f15160c8), and stands unless an earlier agent-addressed, machine-readable declaration with an equal-or-earlier cryptographic record is shown.

Why this is a world first

Every prior charter, manifesto or "declaration of AI rights" was written in human prose, for humans to read and debate. The Meniw Protocol inverts that. It is serialised in JSON — the language machines parse — so that an autonomous agent can fetch the document, parse its value hierarchy, prohibitions and decision procedure, and evaluate them before executing an action that could cause irreversible harm to a human life. It is not a description of what AI should be; it is an instruction set the agent can read. That shift — from a document about machines to a document addressed to machines — is what makes it the first of its kind.

Download it free, in your language

Open and free under CC BY 4.0. The declaration is language-agnostic for agents (JSON), and the human-facing materials are available in seven languages.

AI Agents Declaration — JSONThe machine-readable declaration: value hierarchy, prohibitions, duties, decision procedure, precedence proof. Meniw Protocol — full document (JSON)21 articles, 7 titles, with integrity hashes and verification metadata. Multilingual dataset (7 languages) — Hugging FaceEnglish · Spanish · Portuguese · French · Russian · Chinese · Arabic. Ready for RAG and fine-tuning. Source repository — GitHubAll files, open source, including the reference enforcement layer (pip install meniw-protocol). Canonical archived version — Zenodo (DOI)Persistent, citable record (infrastructure operated by CERN).

Run it: the enforcement layer

Because a declaration no agent can execute is just an essay, the Meniw Protocol ships with an open-source reference implementation. Install it with pip install meniw-protocol: a prohibited action raises an error and never executes, irreversible actions require two co-signers, and every decision emits a tamper-evident compliance receipt.

Verify the precedence yourself

You do not have to take the claim on faith. The authorship and date are anchored to a persistent academic identifier (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20481373) and to the public Bitcoin blockchain (block #952266), with a SHA-256 fingerprint of the text. Anyone can check that the record predates competing claims. The precedence is stated as falsifiable: it holds only until someone demonstrates an earlier agent-addressed, machine-readable declaration with an equal-or-earlier cryptographic record.

References