Shipped: PIC Standard: Provenance & Intent Contracts

Open standard for Provenance & Intent Contracts (PIC) in AI agents. Verify intent, provenance, and evidence before high-impact tool calls: local-first, open source, your policy and trusted keys.

Before an AI agent makes a payment, exports sensitive data, or deletes a resource, it must declare what it intends to do, which sources informed the decision, and what evidence supports its claims. PIC adds a verification gate before tool execution. It checks the action proposal, verifies supporting evidence against your trusted keys, and enforces the required connection between claims and trusted provenance. Your integration blocks execution when verification fails.

WHY PIC?
An agent may have permission to use a payment tool and still act on a forged invoice, an injected instruction, or an unsupported claim that someone approved the transaction.

PIC gives your application a contract for checking the proposed action and its supporting evidence before execution. You decide which tools require PIC and which signing keys to trust. Verification runs in code, without asking a model whether its own decision was justified.

• Require evidence for high-impact actions. Money, privacy, and irreversible actions require a claim linked to trusted provenance under PIC's core rule.
• Reject self-asserted trust. Incoming provenance labels are sanitized to untrusted by default. Accepted signature evidence can establish trust through your configured keyring.
• Bind evidence to the proposed action. Canonical attestations bind the tool, arguments, impact, claims, and provenance IDs. They also support intent binding and expiry checks.
• Check the arguments at the tool boundary. The Python MCP guard and HTTP bridge compare the submitted live arguments with the verified proposal and reject mismatches.
• Keep verification under your control. Run locally, use your own trusted keys, and integrate through Python or the HTTP API. No hosted PIC account or model API key is required for verification.