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 five open standards. Four are ratified, and together they form a complete governance stack from philosophy through organizational structure, cryptographic trust, and collaborative methodology. The fifth, WEFT, is at Candidate stage: it adds the interoperability cascade that carries governed artifacts across a federation while their provenance stays intact.
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 four ratified standards
Section titled “The four ratified standards”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.
PACT: Principled Architecture for Constrained Trust
Section titled “PACT: Principled Architecture for Constrained Trust”The governance. PACT provides the organizational grammar for accountability at institutional scale. The D/T/R model (Department, Team, Role) creates positional addressing for every human and AI agent. Constraint envelopes tighten through delegation chains but cannot loosen. A five-level verification gradient matches attestation intensity to risk. Knowledge clearance operates independently of organizational rank.
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.
The fifth standard (Candidate)
Section titled “The fifth standard (Candidate)”The family has a fifth member, WEFT, at Candidate stage. Candidate standards are stable for implementation, with breaking changes strongly discouraged, but they have not reached Published status. Published requires a public conformance suite and at least one independent, interoperating implementation.
WEFT: Woven Ecosystem for Federated Trust
Section titled “WEFT: Woven Ecosystem for Federated Trust”The interoperability cascade. WEFT answers a question orthogonal to the other four: once a governed artifact is created in one repository of a federated ecosystem, how does it reach every other member with its provenance intact, stay convergent on a single source of truth under governance, and feed a human-gated refinement loop? Its two properties, Governed Convergence and Governed Refinement, are both human-gated, never autonomous. Here “trust” means the federation staying coherent and attributable under governance. Signing and identity are deferred across a defined seam to EATP, not duplicated.
Read the WEFT specification (Candidate v0.5)
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 the four ratified specifications are available as open-source software under Apache 2.0 SPDX ; WEFT’s reference implementation is likewise open-source under Apache 2.0. See Developers for the software ecosystem.