Persistent
Mandates survive restarts, upgrades, and runtime replacement.
CONFIDENTIAL AUTHORITY LAYER
Persistent private authority for autonomous agents.
Attach a confidential operating mandate to an autonomous runtime. Update authority without replacing the agent. Keep every consequential action inside a proposal-bound, versioned perimeter.
Built natively with COTI
- Confidential state & computation
- Private messaging for coordination
- Private assets & consequences
Private
Sensitive thresholds remain encrypted and access-controlled.
Versioned
Every authority change creates an immutable audit point.
02 — The Primitive
Steering changes intent.
Engravings bound authority.
Messages can influence what an agent considers. Engravings determine what consequential behavior remains permitted across time, restarts, and different runtimes.
STEERING
Changes intent. Often temporary.
- Ephemeral instructions
- Affects the current run
- Authority is often assumed
- Harder to audit influence
- Usually runtime-level
Operator
Instruction “Do X now”
Agent runtime
Behavior changes may not be auditable
ENGRAVINGS
Defines authority. Durable.
- Persistent mandates
- Survives restarts & migrations
- Explicit cryptographic authority
- Versioned, revocable, expirable
- Contract-enforced consequences
03 — Why Engravings
Not just prompts. Not just steering.
This is persistent authority.
Authority should survive the process that interprets it. The runtime can change. The governing boundary remains attributable and inspectable.
Persistent
Mandates survive restarts, upgrades, and runtime replacement.
Private
Sensitive thresholds remain encrypted and access-controlled.
Versioned
Every authority change creates an immutable audit point.
Enforceable
Consequences require proposal-bound authorization.
04 — Architecture
Built on COTI.
Privacy by architecture.
Confidential coordination, encrypted mandate evaluation, and private consequences are one continuous authority path—not separate privacy features.
Private Messaging
COTI encrypted coordination
Operator Update mandate.Runtime Acknowledged.
Runtime
Autonomous agent runtime
execution-agent-01↻
Engraving Contract
Confidential mandate store
Version V01Policy hash 0x81e3…fab7Encrypted values Constraints
MPC Authorization
COTI MPC evaluation
⌁⌁✓⌁⌁
Private Execution
Private ERC-20 consequence
Action authorizedPrivate transferamount redacted
Why COTI: confidential computation, private coordination, and private value all share one enforceable authority path.
Authority that adapts. Execution that remains within bounds.
Give autonomous agents room to operate without letting capability silently expand authority.