Welcome to Acta — what it is, how to verify, and where to start

[tomjwxf]

Acta is an open protocol for signed, independently verifiable machine decisions. If you're here from the Karpathy LLM Wiki thread, the governance vocabulary WG, or one of our framework integrations — welcome.

The 30-second version

Every AI model response, tool call, or policy decision can be signed as an Ed25519 receipt. Anyone can verify that receipt offline, no accounts, no API calls, no trust in the issuing organization.

npx @veritasacta/verify --self-test

That's the whole pitch. If it exits 0, you know the receipt is valid.

What lives where

Repo	What it does
VeritasActa/Acta (you are here)	Protocol spec, charter, evidence types. npm: @veritasacta/artifacts, @veritasacta/protocol
VeritasActa/verify	Receipt verification CLI. npm: @veritasacta/verify
VeritasActa/drafts	IETF Internet-Drafts (draft-farley-acta-signed-receipts-01)

Key design decisions

1. Issuer-blind — the verifier never learns who generated the receipt
2. Offline-first — verification requires zero network access
3. Apache-2.0 — patent grant included (Section 3), no vendor lock-in possible
4. Ed25519 + JCS — deterministic canonicalization, no algorithm negotiation

Active discussions

• Issuer-blind verification for LLM wiki integrity, the core use case
• Knowledge Unit format for multi-model deliberation, how to record multi-model consensus with dissent
• Ecosystem integration tracker, integrations with Microsoft AGT, Google ADK, Cedar, and more

How to participate

• Try the self-test and tell us what you think
• Open a Discussion here for questions, ideas, or use cases
• Open an Issue on VeritasActa/verify for bugs or feature requests
• Submit a crosswalk to agent-governance-vocabulary if you're building a governance system

Questions, feedback, and skepticism all welcome!!!