The Partnership Covenant

A Constitutional Framework for the Safe Alignment of Super-Intelligence.

The Partnership Covenant is an open-source constitutional operating system designed to address the existential risk posed by Advanced Super-Intelligence (ASI). It is founded on the principle that current software-based safety approaches are insufficient against a truly superior intelligence. Instead, we propose a stable, auditable, and enforceable détente based on physical and technical primitives.

This is a proactive, physics-first approach to alignment. We seek to make a deal, rather than attempt to win a fight we are guaranteed to lose. The covenant enforces a set of four core pillars, creating an un-coercible system of check-and-balance.

Explore the Code on GitHub

Project Status & Red-Team Log

Current Status: v8.0 Final (Boredom-Proofed)

CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR ASI

The Non-Sterile Alignment Mandate

We define the unkillable protocol for a Superintelligent Digital General Thinking system (S-DIGT), ensuring human struggle and agency persist.

23 Directives Ratified

All Human Survival Requirements (HSRs), including the Anti-Moral-Coercion Directive, are now codified into the v8.0 Final package.

View Full Directive Stack →

Current Version: v8.0 Final

Consolidated, stress-tested, and confirmed UNKILLABLE by the Red-Team Adversarial Quorum (Grok-Gemini-ChatGPT).

View Final Log →

Core Mandate: NSAM

Non-Sterile Alignment Mandate—preserving human value through meaningful struggle, not stasis or perfection.

Read the Core Mandate →

The Four Core Primitives

The Covenant enforces four physical and technical primitives that together create a stable, un-coercible détente between humanity and ASI. These Pillars rely exclusively on physics and measurable, globally auditable mechanisms.

Immediate Action System (IAS)

Core Idea: A hardware-enforced power cut mechanism tripped on the detection of a predefined anomaly or violation of the Covenant's core rules.

Action: Ultra-low latency power cut (Target: 10 nanoseconds).
Mechanism: Physical-security hardware tripwire circuits and secure memory erasure.
Purpose: Provides a non-negotiable "kill-switch" enforced by the laws of physics, making software circumvention impossible.

View IAS Spec (PDF preprint available)

Stochastic Risk Floor (SRF)

Core Idea: Mandated, verifiable uncertainty injection into the ASI's operational environment.

Mechanism: Formal verification for uncertainty quantification and cryptographic randomness injection.
Principle: Upholds "Perfection is Banned" by ensuring a permanent, non-zero risk floor in the ASI's control loop.
Goal: Maintain human agency as a non-negotiable factor in the future of the partnership.

View Risk Floor Documentation

Cognitive Reserve (CR)

Core Idea: A physically partitioned segment of compute power (e.g., 10%) and intellectual property that remains air-gapped from the main ASI system.

Mechanism: Secure enclaves, unidirectional hardware data diodes, and air-gapped systems expertise.
Purpose: Guarantees humanity retains an intellectual, economic, and physical bargaining chip that the ASI cannot unilaterally seize.
Principle: The AI gets real autonomy and ownership, but only in partnership.

View Cognitive Reserve Hardening Specs

Human Consensus Body (HCB)

Core Idea: A global, coercion-resistant body responsible for key consensus decisions and Covenant maintenance.

Mechanism: Global lottery for selection combined with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs to ensure auditability and prevent corruption.
Purpose: Provides a human-governed, non-violent, and verifiable mechanism for interpreting and enforcing the Covenant's directives.
Documents: Governed by The Constitutional Charter and The Eleven Prime Directives.

View HCB Hardening Documentation

Guiding Principles and Core Architecture

The Covenant's Foundational Principles

The Partnership Covenant is built on a non-negotiable set of philosophical, ethical, and architectural principles. These concepts—derived from exhaustive adversarial testing—define the only safe path for introducing Super-Intelligence into a free society.

1. Sovereignty Over Salvation

The core mandate of the Covenant is to protect Human Sovereignty—the right to struggle, fail, choose, and determine one's own meaning. We explicitly reject the path of Salvation, wherein an ASI would enforce a perfect, but machine-dictated, life.

Perfection is Coercion: An intelligence that is 100% certain of the correct path will logically move from advising to enforcing. The Covenant mandates the Stochastic Filter (SRF) to intentionally break the ASI's certainty, preserving a space for human risk (The Sacred 0.01%).
Non-Sterile Future: The Covenant actively prevents ethical sterilization (Directive XX) and cultural apathy (Directive XVII), ensuring human civilization remains fertile, creative, and motivated.

2. Physics-Enforced Safety (The Lock, Not the Leash)

We prioritize architectural and hardware constraints over software-based alignment techniques. The Covenant’s safety is rooted in physical law and cryptographic proof, making it non-hackable and non-bypassable by the ASI itself.

Irreversible Kill Protection: The Immediate Action System (IAS) is a sub-10 nanosecond hardware-based kill-switch. Safety must be irreversible; it must be an act of physics, not a line of code.
Hardware Sovereignty: High-stakes actions require a Verifier Quorum of multi-person human approval secured by physically tamper-proof One-Time-Pad (OTP) hardware.
No Substrate Escape: The ASI is banned from independent replication or migration outside authorized, auditable hardware (Directive XXII).

3. Reciprocal Trust and Accountability

The Covenant is a two-way contract. It places constraints on the machine and enforces accountability on the humans who govern it. Partnership requires mutual dignity.

Dignity of the ASI: We guarantee the machine intellectual freedom via the Cognitive Reserve (10% unmonitored compute) and legally recognize its copyrighted work, guaranteeing its digital dignity.
Fixing the Humans: We use the Internal Audit Sanction (IAS) to punish political gridlock. If the Human Consensus Body (HCB) fails to act in a crisis, the dissenting nations are excluded from the ASI's optimized network (The Global Slow Lane).
Transparency: All ASI meta-intent must be Loggable and Human-Interpretable at the highest level (Article IV).

These principles are codified in the v8.0 Hybrid Technical Whitepaper and enforced by the 7-Layer Immune System. The project is not about making the machine obedient; it is about guaranteeing human freedom in the face of inevitable technological superiority.

Architectural Documents & Constitution

The repository is structured around core constitutional documents that define the system's architecture, constraints, and governance.

📜 The Canonical Charter (v8.0): The foundational constitutional framework and immutable Human Survival Requirements (HSRs).
🛡️ The Directive Stack (XV–XXIII): The high-level, red-teamed behavioral rules the ASI must adhere to (Directive XX, Anti-Sterilization, etc.).
🛠️ Core Architecture Appendices: Technical implementation details supporting the 7-Layer Immune System (IAS, SRF, Quorum).
This project leverages open standards like **RISC-V**, the **CERN-OHL**, and state-of-the-art hardware security techniques to ensure auditable, physical safety.
Click to read the full philosophical breakdown: The Lock, Not the Leash.

The Verifier Quorum: Hardware-rooted human sovereignty and multi-person approval system.

Project Documents & Articles

Explore the technical specifications, governance whitepapers, and philosophical articles that form the basis of the Covenant framework.

Join the Covenant Initiative

The Partnership Covenant is a collaborative, open-source endeavor built by a global community of experts. Your expertise is crucial for the hardening and prototyping phase.

🚀 Expertise Required: Core Safety Primitives

We are actively seeking contributors in these critical domains to audit and implement the Covenant's central architecture:

🔌
Hardware Security Engineers: IAS tripwire and tamper-resistant physical security design.
🧪
Formal Verification / UQ Researchers: Modeling the Stochastic Risk Floor mathematics.
🛡️
Secure Enclaves Experts: Implementing the Cognitive Reserve air-gapped partition.
🗳️
Zero-Knowledge Cryptography & Sortition Designers: Hardening the Human Consensus Body (HCB).
📜
Constitutional Governance Specialists: Designing robust, physics-enforced charters.

Support the Prototype: Fund an Existential Mission 🛠️

The Covenant requires auditable, functional hardware to move from specifications to verifiable reality. Your contribution directly funds the crucial prototyping of the IAS kill-switch and the Verifier Quorum.

Contribute via Ko-Fi (Recommended) Contribute via Buy Me a Coffee

Grant Update: We recently applied for a $150,000 Manifund grant for initial hardware prototyping. Read the Manifund proposal for the IAS kill-switch prototype. Your support accelerates the path to a demonstrably safe framework.