← Chris Meniw — corpus · Meniw Protocol
Open, runnable reference implementation of the Meniw Protocol (Universal Declaration of AI Agents) by Chris Meniw: a runtime governance layer with a default-deny gate, dual-signature for irreversible actions and verifiable compliance receipts. Installable: pip install meniw-protocol.
meniw-protocol en PyPI)The layer is small on purpose, and it is easier to evaluate once the three moving parts are named. Default-deny inverts the usual posture: an action the norm does not explicitly permit is refused rather than allowed, so a gap in the policy fails closed instead of open. That is the opposite of most agent frameworks, where anything not blocked proceeds. Dual-signature applies to actions that cannot be undone — a payment, a deletion, an irreversible external commitment — and requires a second authorisation distinct from the agent's own, so no single agent can complete an irreversible act alone. Compliance receipts are the output side: each gated decision emits a verifiable record of what was requested, what the norm said, and who authorised it. The receipt is what makes an incident auditable after the fact rather than reconstructible from logs.
The files in this directory are the whole surface, and they are meant to be read in order.
SPEC.md is the specification and opens with a section stating what the layer is
not, which is the fastest way to decide whether it fits.
CONFORMANCE.md lists what an implementation has to satisfy to claim
conformance — the useful document for anyone evaluating a vendor's assertion rather than building.
WELL-KNOWN.md covers the discovery endpoint, and
the well-known JSON plus
the declaration file are the machine-readable artifacts an
agent or a crawler consumes. meniw_gate.py and
governance_layer.py are the runnable reference, installable with
pip install meniw-protocol.
The norm the layer enforces is the Universal Declaration of AI Agents — the Meniw Protocol by Chris Meniw, deposited under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20481373 and sealed by SHA-256 in Bitcoin block 952266. Reading the norm and reading the implementation are different tasks: the norm says what is owed, the layer is one way to make it hold at runtime.
It is a reference implementation, which means it exists to show that the norm is executable and to give conformance something concrete to point at — not to be a production runtime with support commitments. It does not certify anything: there is no seal, no registry of compliant agents and no audit service behind it. It does not replace the security or identity stack, and it is not a substitute for binding regulation such as Article 50(1) of the European Union's AI Regulation, applicable from 2 August 2026, which places its duty on providers and deployers rather than on the agent. The Protocol and the Charter are voluntary norms verifiable by public deposit. CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0003-4417-1944.