Epistemic status: Draft standard + design proposal. I’m looking for adversarial review, missing edge cases, and “this breaks in practice because X.” This is not a solved alignment story. It’s an attempt at shared vocabulary + auditable interfaces for what systems do which can apply universally to any kind of autonomous system across cyber, physical, and mixed domains.

Some key highlights of what it may provide which I have been unable to find elsewhere:

Black box compliance: Certify behavior, not weights. Labs and defense orgs keep IP; regulators get enforceable and auditable standards across borders without revealing sensitive capabilities
Mechanistic anti-laundering: Semantic claims constrained by attested effects. "Backup" can't masquerade as "exfiltration" - the grammar rejects it structurally, not by policy. Think of it as a "lie detector for AI."
True universality: Same vocabulary across LLMs, robotics, finance, cyber, defense. I do include explicit military applications which may seem dark, but my goTenna experience convinced me any standard for global safety that can't handle use-of-force decisions is critically incomplete.
Morally justifiable system for acceleration: The system does not impose a performance tax on capability development. The opposite. It provides socially justifiable "cover" for labs/nations to increase capabilities, as long as they're conforming.
Other: There's more in the paper, but these are some of the key highlights.

Full draft spec + companion paper linked below. Note they are quite long, I'd appreciate anyone reading them in full, although welcome to drop into an LLM of your choice and query for novelty, holes, applications, etc.

TAO v0.9.0 Draft Standard (PDF)
Companion paper (architecture + motivation + broader framework): Zero-Trust Governance for Agentic AI: Typed Action Interfaces, Effect Attestation, and Anti-Goodhart Enforcement (link)
Github Repo: https://github.com/jperdomo88/temper

Summary

AI safety keeps tripping over a basic infrastructure failure: we don’t have a shared, auditable vocabulary for actions and their effects. Labs say “safe,” “aligned,” “robust,” etc., but these claims aren’t comparable or verifiable across systems.

This post introduces TAO (TEMPER Action Ontology): a universal, action-interface ontology intended to sit between agents and the world (via adapters), producing ...

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