Agent Authority Standards Institute

An open standard for governing the authority of AI agents that act on a person's behalf.

AI agents are shipping that act — they trade, pay, file, and publish for the people and institutions they serve. The venues that host them frequently disclaim supervision; regulators require it; the person on whose behalf the agent acts is made responsible, often with no instrument to discharge that responsibility. The Governed Agent Authority (GAA) Standard specifies that instrument: authority as a granted, scoped, revocable record; deny-by-default gates; a hold-and-ratify path for consequential acts; sovereign revocation; and sealed records any third party can re-derive.

The Institute stewards the specification. It does not sell a product.

Read the Standard → How stewardship works →

What AASI is

The Agent Authority Standards Institute (AASI) is a standalone steward dedicated to one discipline: the governance of AI-agent authority. It develops the GAA specification in the open, records its decisions where implementers and the public can read them, and holds the specification's name as a neutral asset rather than a vendor's property.

Founded by the team behind the reference implementation; governed independently.

That disclosure is deliberate and permanent. A reference implementation exists and was written by the founding team; within AASI that team is one implementer among equals, holding no privileged status in the specification. Where the specification text and any implementation disagree, the text governs and the implementation has a defect — decided by the recorded process, never by any one implementer's preference.

Why an Institute

This steward was first chartered as the Agent Authority Standards Group and renamed to Institute on 2026-07-13. A group is its members — a claim falsifiable at one member. An Institute is a standalone establishment dedicated to a discipline, which is literally what this steward is, and which remains true regardless of how many members it has. Neutrality derives from the charter's procedure — open specification, one conformance path, no single-vendor veto — not from a headcount.

The honest posture (stated plainly, everywhere)

A reference implementation of the GAA controls is live as a mechanism: gates, sealing, examiner re-derivation, and adversarial evaluation run without a human signer. The products built on it are demonstrations — they run with simulated counterparties, and signature gates are held pending licensed professionals, funded rails, and counsel. Nothing on this site is called “proven” that is only mechanism-proven, and no adoption is claimed that has not happened. Where a control is detective (tamper-evident) rather than preventive, the Standard says so and does not label it otherwise.