machineauthority.org

Source for the Machine Authority Protocol website. MAP defines the wire format for the Action Authorization Boundary — the missing checkpoint between an AI agent's decision to act and the action firing. Four v1.0 specifications: CAR (the canonical action), Decision Envelope (the AAB's signed verdict), Elicitation Loop (the four-message defer protocol), CAC (the signed receipt).

The specification itself lives in PlawIO/machineauthority-protocol. The repository sits in the Plaw, Inc. GitHub organization while founding co-maintainers are confirmed; it migrates to a neutral machineauthority/ organization once a multi-org maintainer council is seated, per GOVERNANCE.md. Both this site and the spec are MIT-licensed. This repository is only the web presence: four specification pages, governance, and contributing notes. No marketing content, no product pages.

What this site is

• A neutral home for the four v1.0 specifications: Canonical Action Representation (CAR), Decision Envelope, Elicitation Loop, and Cryptographic Attestation of Consent (CAC).
• A comparison of where existing standards (OPA, Agent-Auth-Protocol, MCP Elicitation, Google A2A, SPIFFE) stop and where the AAB begins.
• A copy-pasteable end-to-end verifier demo at /examples/v1/dispatch.sh.
• A link into the governance process and an invitation to contribute.

What this site is not

• A marketing page for veto.so, which is a reference implementation of this protocol, not the protocol itself.
• A hosted product.
• Anything with client-side JavaScript. It is static HTML generated by Astro.

Stack

• Astro v6 (static output, zero client JS)
• Raw CSS in src/styles/global.css (no Tailwind, no CSS-in-JS)
• System monospace stack (no web fonts)
• @astrojs/sitemap for sitemap-index.xml
• Pixel-art wordmark in public/logo.svg

Development

Requires Node 22.12+ and Bun (or swap in npm/pnpm by deleting bun.lock).

bun install
bun run dev      # dev server on http://localhost:4321
bun run build    # static output -> ./dist
bun run preview  # preview the built site

Project layout

src/
  layouts/Base.astro           Layout with centered logo + pipe nav hero, OG/canonical tags
  pages/
    index.astro                Home: gap framing, comparison table, four spec cards
    governance.astro
    contributing.astro
    spec/
      car.astro                          CAR v1.0 (RFC-style)
      decision-envelope.astro            Decision Envelope v1.0
      elicitation-loop.astro             Elicitation Loop v1.0
      cryptographic-attestation.astro    CAC v1.0
  styles/global.css            All styling lives here
public/
  examples/v1/dispatch.sh      End-to-end verifier demo (curl | sh)
  logo.svg                     Pixel-art MACHINE/AUTHORITY wordmark
  favicon.svg                  Letter mark for browser tab
  og.svg                       Open Graph share card (1200x630)
  robots.txt

Design notes

• Plain white (#fff) background, near-black text (#111). One orange accent (#e67e00) used exactly once in the nav (GitHub link). No gradients, no shadows, no client-side JS.
• System monospace stack: ui-monospace, "Lucida Console", Menlo, Consolas, "Courier New", monospace — zero network requests for fonts.
• Inspired by tinygrad.org (centered pixel logo, pipe nav, dense content, no chrome) and IETF RFC formatting (bordered status blocks, RFC 2119 language, dense typography).

Affiliation

Machine Authority Protocol was initiated by Plaw, Inc. in the course of building Veto, our commercial action-authorization platform — Veto needed a wire format that didn't exist. From v1.0 onward the spec is governed by a multi-org maintainer council; Plaw holds at most a plurality of seats, never a majority. Same pattern as SPIFFE (seeded by Scytale), Sigstore (Red Hat/Google/Purdue), OpenTelemetry (Google/LightStep/Microsoft/Uber). MIT-licensed; if Plaw shuts down, the spec keeps shipping. See /governance.

License

Site source and specifications: MIT.