Open Standards
Autonomous systems make consequential decisions at machine speed. The governance infrastructure for these systems does not exist in any standard form. Organizations either build ad hoc controls or rely on principles that lack implementation mechanisms.
The Terrene Foundation publishes three specifications that address this gap. Each specification handles a distinct concern (philosophy, protocol, and methodology) and together they form a complete governance stack.
All specifications are licensed under CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons . Anyone may implement them, build commercial products upon them, or extend them. No contributor holds exclusive rights.
The three specifications
Section titled “The three specifications”CARE: Collaborative Autonomous Reflective Enterprise
Section titled “CARE: Collaborative Autonomous Reflective Enterprise”The philosophy. CARE defines why governance matters and how it works. It establishes the two-plane architecture (Trust Plane and Execution Plane), the five constraint dimensions (Financial, Operational, Temporal, Data Access, Communication), and the reflective improvement loops that keep governance responsive as systems evolve.
EATP: Enterprise Agent Trust Protocol
Section titled “EATP: Enterprise Agent Trust Protocol”The protocol. EATP makes trust verifiable at the transaction level. Every autonomous action generates a cryptographically signed decision record. Ed25519 signatures, monotonic trust escalation (decisions can be elevated but never downgraded), and tamper-evident audit trails provide the mechanical basis for accountability.
CO: Cognitive Orchestration
Section titled “CO: Cognitive Orchestration”The methodology. CO structures the collaboration between humans and autonomous systems. It defines patterns for workflow composition, agent coordination, constraint propagation, and the feedback loops that connect execution outcomes back to governance policy.
Versioning
Section titled “Versioning”Specifications follow semantic versioning. Breaking changes require a major version increment and a transition period. Current versions will be listed on each specification’s page as they are published.
Implementation
Section titled “Implementation”Reference implementations of all three specifications are available as open-source software under Apache 2.0 SPDX . See Developers for the software ecosystem.