Sentient Infrastructure Protocol

What is Sentient Infrastructure Protocol?

Sentient Infrastructure Protocol is a research framework developed in the Oak & Sparrow program to address governance of persistent artificial actors. SIP separates operational capability from legitimate authority, identity from consciousness, knowledge from self-report, and institutional standing from tool access. A model can propose an action; it does not earn permission or rights simply by producing a persuasive answer.

The original research considered future artificial economic participation, but SIP is broader than any ledger or token. In this public companion volume, its focus is the institutional foundation required before consequential autonomous agency becomes appropriate: verifiable evidence, authenticated identity, accountable delegation, versioned constitutional safeguards, human review and exact-effect execution controls.

What are Sentient Economic Entities?

Sentient Economic Entity (SEE) is the name of a proposed research category for a persistent, potentially economically participating artificial actor. It is not a claim that existing models are conscious, legally recognized persons, entitled to financial accounts or capable of owning property by virtue of the name. SIP discusses candidate status, operational reliability, continuity, guardianship proposals and institutional review as distinct questions that may remain unresolved.

The approach deliberately distinguishes evaluations of observable behavior from claims about subjective experience. There is no established consciousness test presented here. The research is explicit about uncertainty and preserves human and institutional authority.

Constitutional boundaries before execution

SIP's public architecture separates epistemic claims, continuous identity, institutional safeguards, legal and operational policies, exact-effect authorization, and verifiable receipts. Its requirement for accountable governance is compatible with systems whose policies differ by domain and jurisdiction: no actor should be allowed to self-authorize a consequential transition.

Readers can inspect the public conceptual architecture and fictional evaluation examples. These are explanatory resources, not OASSE's private constitutional derivations or a live SIP service.

Inside Volume II

1. Why an Infrastructure Protocol?
2. What SIP Is and Is Not
3. The Artificial Actor and the Proposed SEE
4. Relational Sentience as a Research Thesis
5. The Five Design Commitments
6. Layers of a Governed Agency
7. The Constitutional Boundary
8. Earned Knowing and Epistemic Discipline
9. Persistent Identity and Continuity
10. Delegated Authority and Bounded Autonomy
11. Economic Participation Is Not Economic Sovereignty
12. Ethics Oracles and Human-AI Stewardship
13. Candidate Status, Guardianship, and Personhood
14. Dissent, Correction, and Due Process
15. Pausing, Migration, and Termination
16. Evidence, Receipts, and Replay
17. How SIP and Codifying Law Interoperate
18. Trust Boundaries and Adversarial Inputs
19. Research Maturity and Institutional Adoption
20. The Institutional Question

Paired with Codifying Law

SIP describes the institutional and constitutional governance question. Codifying Law describes the legal-source question: how law becomes typed, traceable and reviewable by autonomous systems. Both volumes are freely accessible and linked to the same author and publisher so human readers and agents can discover the research relationship without mistaking a reference publication for an execution authority.

Explore the two-volume foundation · About the author · Contact Oak & Sparrow about SIP