Requests for Comment

Proposed revisions are published here before they become doctrine — not after.

A doctrine that asks enterprises to govern autonomous behavior must itself be governed. Versioning and a public changelog cover what has already changed. This section covers what has not changed yet.

Each request for comment states a proposal, the reasoning behind it, the questions that remain genuinely open, a review window, and a version-lock date. Nothing on an RFC page is doctrine. The current doctrine is always the version named in the footer, and a proposal becomes doctrine only when it lands in a numbered release recorded in the changelog.

RFC 001 — The Conformance Layer (proposed for v4)

Revision 2. Open for comment through 31 October 2026. Proposes a fourth doctrine layer: twenty-nine testable, mechanism-agnostic Conformance Criteria distributed across the five Architectural Planes, against which any implementation and any external standard can be assessed. Introduces Action Tiering, gives Intent Hijacking an architectural home, and rebuilds the Maturity Model as an assessment instrument in which each level licenses a tier of agent action.

Revision 1 was reviewed adversarially on the day it was published. That review found three places where its criteria could not all hold at once, and identified requirements missing entirely, two of which now rank among the most important in the proposal. Revision 2 records those corrections openly rather than applying them silently, and the version-lock target has moved out of Q4 2026 as a result.

How to respond

Comments go to rfc@aiharnessdoctrine.org. Substantive disagreement is more useful than endorsement. The most valuable response to a proposed criterion is a specific case in which it fails, is unmeasurable in practice, or is satisfied by a system that is plainly ungoverned.

Responses are read by the editorial panel and are not published. Where a response changes the proposal, the change is recorded in the changelog entry for the version that lands it.