The open standard for revoking trust across chains of agents.
T-RUE™ — Transitive Revocation of Upstream Endorsements — extends governance from a single agent to the chains of agents that endorse one another, and rests on one principle: when trust is withdrawn upstream, it must fall everywhere downstream.
T-RUE: Traceable, Transparent, Timely, Trustworthy — and still true.
T-RUE is a published open standard (v1.0), released on the International Day of Charity under the same royalty-free patent pledge as F-ACT and intended for the same neutral Swiss foundation, being established. It is free to read, implement and build on — and still open to your review as it evolves.
Open by default — free to read, free to cite, free to implement. No licence, no registration, no permission required.
The problem
Trust that outlives its welcome
When one agent authorises another, and that agent sub-delegates to a third, a chain of endorsements forms. Withdraw the authority at the top and the withdrawal has to cascade — or an agent three links down keeps acting on trust that no longer exists. F-ACT asks whether a single agent’s authority can be revoked and proven revoked. T-RUE asks the harder question: can a revocation travel the whole chain, fast enough and visibly enough that no stale endorsement is ever relied upon again.
Agent A grants authority to B; B endorses C; C relies on that endorsement to act. Each link inherits trust from the one above it.
A revokes B’s authority. But C never hears of it — and keeps acting on an endorsement whose foundation was removed minutes, hours or days ago.
The revocation cascades down every link, in measured time, and can be proven to have propagated — so a withdrawn trust stops reading as valid everywhere at once.
T-RUE · Transitive Revocation of Upstream Endorsements
The four movements
A revocation that cannot be traced, seen, timed and trusted is a revocation on paper only. T-RUE turns each word of its name into a checkable property of the chain.
Traceable
Can every endorsement be followed to its origin, link by link along the delegation chain?
Transparent
Can every party downstream see the current endorsement state — not just the party that issued it?
Timely
When authority is withdrawn upstream, how fast does the revocation propagate — and is that latency measured, not assumed?
Trustworthy
Does a revoked endorsement stop reading as valid everywhere it was ever relied upon — provably, not on trust?
Together they resolve on the name itself: an endorsement is still true only while nothing upstream has withdrawn it — and the moment something does, every party downstream can tell.
Two standards, one guarantee
Two sides of the same coin
F-ACT governs the single agent — before it acts. T-RUE governs what happens between agents — when trust moves, and when it must be withdrawn. One without the other leaves half the problem open.
Govern one agent, before it acts.
Five questions every agent must answer — Grant, Usage, Audit, Revocation, Data — graded across four conformance tiers. It settles whether a single agent’s authority is accountable and provable.
Read F-ACTGovern the chain between agents — as trust moves.
Traceable, Transparent, Timely, Trustworthy revocation across delegation chains — so a trust withdrawn at the top falls everywhere below it, in measured time, provably.
You are hereT-RUE extends F-ACT’s revocation clause from one agent to many. It is a companion standard, not a replacement — the two are designed to be adopted together.
The context
Why revocation, and why now
Agents are beginning to delegate to one another directly. The protocols for agent-to-agent delegation are arriving faster than the means to withdraw the trust they create — which is exactly the gap standards bodies have started to name.
NIST’s AI Agent Standards Initiative singled out agent-to-agent delegation and tamper-evident logging as gaps that controls built for static software do not fill — the precise territory T-RUE addresses.
NIST · AI Agent Standards InitiativeAs agent-to-agent protocols let one agent hand work to another without a human in the loop, endorsements will chain across organisations. A shared, open way to revoke them — and prove the revocation — becomes a prerequisite, not a nicety.
Held to the same guarantee as F-ACT.
T-RUE is developed under the same royalty-free patent pledge as F-ACT, and its core claims are intended for the same neutral Swiss foundation — so that no single company, including Society OS, can ever hold a veto over the rules. The Foundation does not yet exist as a legal entity, and the transfer has not yet completed. Until it does, Society OS Pty Ltd makes the pledge as current owner, and that pledge binds every successor and assign.
Read the stewardship and IP-transfer storyPublished, and runnable
Run it now
T-RUE is published — and you can run it right now. There is an example revocation envelope, an in-browser checker and builder, a canonical test-vector suite, a dependency-free validator, and the standard in machine-readable form. Everything checks the T1 · Declared floor for real.
Paste an envelope into the checker, or build one field by field with the wizard. Grab the example envelope and the validator script.
Open the kitA canonical suite of valid and deliberately invalid envelopes with expected outcomes. Run them in your browser or use them as fixtures.
Run the vectorsThe standard as spec.json and spec.txt — CORS-open, built from the same source as this page so it can never drift.
View spec.jsonHelp shape what comes next
T-RUE is published, and open on purpose. If your agents delegate to other agents — inside your organisation or across a supply chain — the revocation problem is yours too, and the standard is better for your review. Join the working group forming around the standards family, or start with its sibling standards.
Meet OCCY
Eight arms, each cradling a node of governance. OCCY is the face of the Open Conformance Coalition — the vendor-neutral body that stewards T-RUE alongside its sibling standards. Conformance is a web, not a monolith; holding it together takes reach, not force.
Meet the Coalition