Guardian · Authority OS
The Authority OS
Guardian governs the whole life of authority: who holds it, what it covers, who it passes to, how it is enforced, what it produced, and how it ends.
The authority lifecycle
Authority, from the moment it is given to the moment it ends
Choose a stage. ALLOW, ASK and DENY are how Guardian answers inside “Govern execution” — the product is the whole system of authority around them.
Establish authority
LiveA human principal — a person, a household, an organization — is the source of every authority Guardian enforces. Provider credentials stay sealed inside Guardian.
You connect your payments, cloud and business accounts; your agents never see the keys.
Inside the Authority OS
More than an approval: a complete system of authority
Each capability carries one status. Open it for what it does and where the evidence lives.
Declarative authorityLive
Machine-readable authority definitions that do not depend on a model's interpretation.
Evidence: Action Packs, intents, plans and grants as declared inputs
Intent and plan authorityLive
Govern the goal and the plan, not only isolated actions.
Evidence: WO-022, deployed
Obligations and prerequisitesProven
Requirements that must stay satisfied before, during and after execution.
Evidence: WO-023
Causal action sequencesProven
Actions understood as connected sequences, so a harmless step and a harmful one are judged together.
Evidence: WO-024
Delegation and lineageProven
Where authority came from and how it moved — and information lineage across agents.
Evidence: WO-016, WO-019, WO-025
Agent-to-agent authorityProven
When one autonomous system hands work to another, authority can only narrow.
Evidence: WO-016; delegation demo
Runtime trustProven
Authority evaluated against the trust level of the runtime the agent is acting from.
Evidence: WO-026
Multi-party authorityProven
Actions that need more than one principal, with quorum, veto and separation of duties.
Evidence: WO-027
Transaction authorityProven
Economic and financial consequences with limits, budgets and compensation.
Evidence: WO-028; vendor-payment demo (sandbox)
Pre-execution simulationProven
See what a policy would decide before it is enforced.
Evidence: WO-030
Formal authority verificationProven
Machine-checked proofs that authority rules hold.
Evidence: WO-031 (Z3), CI gate
Universal kernel certificationProven
A never-seen autonomous system governed with zero changes to the authority kernel.
Evidence: WO-033 / UAC-002; kernel frozen by hash manifest
Distributed authority fabricProven
One source of truth enforced across many systems and environments.
Evidence: WO-032, merged; not yet deployed
Physical safety envelopesSimulated
Bounded authority for machines, with emergency stop taking precedence.
Evidence: WO-029; robot demo — simulation only, no certified hardware control
- Live
- Running in the hosted Guardian product today.
- Proven
- Built and evidenced in Guardian's engineering record; not yet running in production.
- Sandbox
- The real Guardian authority path against a test system (for example, Stripe test mode).
- Simulated
- The real Guardian authority path against a simulated system.
Inside “Govern execution”
Three answers, decided deterministically
A model may propose an action. It never decides whether it is allowed.
- ALLOW
Inside the authority given. Runs once, exactly as described.
- ASK
Beyond the limits. Waits for the right human, bound to the exact action.
- DENY
Unauthorized, changed, replayed, revoked or unclear. Never runs.
Where Guardian’s protection ends
- Guardian protects an action only when it executes through a Guardian-protected path. An agent that keeps your password, a direct token, unrestricted shell access or a logged-in browser session can go around it.
- Guardian does not detect every prompt injection. It makes sure an injected instruction cannot create authority you did not give.
- Guardian holds no SOC 2, FedRAMP or other third-party certification.
The agent is never the authority. The human is.
Odingard Security · Trust infrastructure for autonomous systems