Frequently asked questions

F-ACT is the Framework for Agent Conformance & Trust — an open, vendor-neutral standard for governing autonomous software agents. It answers a specific question that identity standards do not: was this particular action authorised, and can you prove it? You can read the specification in full, for free.

Yes. The specification is free to read, cite, implement and require — no login, no fee, no permission. The patent pledge covering the core claims is irrevocable, royalty-free and worldwide, and it binds every successor and assign. Openness applies to the specification; the name is a trademark so it keeps identifying the authentic standard.

The standard is the free specification anyone can implement. F-ACT Verified is a conformance mark issued against a published registry entry — a shorthand that a specific claim has been recorded and can be checked. You never need the mark to use the standard; the mark simply makes a claim easy for a third party to trust. See the implementer guide.

The core claims are held today by Society OS Pty Ltd as current owner, and are being placed with the Open Conformance Foundation — a neutral Swiss steward being established for this purpose — so that no single company can hold a veto over the rules. The Foundation licenses the claims back to the company on a non-exclusive basis: the identical terms available to anyone else.

Not as a legal person. The founding charter is scheduled to be signed on 5 September 2026, with entry in the Swiss commercial register — and legal personality — to follow. Until then Society OS Pty Ltd publishes and maintains the standard as current owner, under a pledge that carries across the transfer. The Foundation page sets out exactly where things stand.

Society OS Pty Ltd holds a pending Australian provisional patent application (2026900773, filed 2 February 2026, currently unexamined) covering particular methods of achieving conformance. That operational IP is separate from the core claims and is not covered by the intended transfer to the Foundation. The pledge means the core claims are never asserted against anyone who uses or implements the standard.

Yes. You may state that a system conforms to F-ACT and cite the specification without asking anyone for permission — that is what an open standard is for. Please refer to it fairly, as set out in the trademark notice.

The standard is versioned and changes only through a published, reviewable process — never by quietly editing the live text. A conformance claim made against a published version stays meaningful. The governance page sets out the intended model and how neutrality is protected.

It sits beneath them. Those regimes tell you which outcomes you must achieve; F-ACT is one operational way to produce the evidence — a per-action record of who authorised what, within which scope, on which data, logged and revocable. The framework crosswalk maps each of the five F-ACT dimensions to the most directly related provisions of the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001 and the OECD AI Principles. The mappings are informative, not a claim of legal equivalence or certification.

Start by implementing the standard and publishing a declared entry in the registry. If you want to help shape the standard as the coalition forms, the coalition page is the place to start.