Manifesto
The internet was designed for humans.
That assumption is ending.
AI can now speak, write, browse, negotiate, buy, apply and act on our behalf. Soon, digital services will interact constantly with humans, humans assisted by AI and autonomous agents.
The problem is not that AI participates.
The problem is that we can no longer reliably tell who is acting.
We believe every consequential digital interaction should be able to answer three questions:
Proof of Actor is building the trust infrastructure to answer them.
Mission
Build the trust infrastructure that allows humans and AI agents to interact safely, transparently and accountably across the internet.
Vision
An internet where every consequential digital action can establish who or what performed it, who authorised it and who is accountable.
North Star
Applications stop asking whether traffic "looks like a bot" and start asking for an Actor Attestation.
Category ambition
Become the trust layer applications query before relying on a digital actor.
Every layer of internet infrastructure answers one question well. This is ours.
Payments infrastructure
How does value move?
Identity providers
Who authenticated?
Network security
Can this traffic be trusted?
Proof of Actor
Who or what is actually acting?
Who we build for
How we work
We publish the thesis and the interface, not the secret sauce. We describe what Proof of Actor is designed to establish and label every interface as a preview until it genuinely exists. We do not publish customers, accuracy figures or integrations we do not have.
We aim to be
- Infrastructural
- Technical
- Calm
- Neutral
- Privacy-aware
- Internet-native
Never
- Surveillance-oriented
- Alarmist
- Crypto-first
- Consumer gimmick
Glossary
The language of Actor Trust
- Actor
- The entity actually responsible for producing or controlling a digital interaction.
- Principal
- The human or organisation ultimately represented by an actor.
- Actor Trust
- The overall category: trust in who or what is acting, its control and its authority.
- Proof of Human
- The human-presence primitive.
- Proof of Control
- The human-control primitive.
- Proof of Authority
- The agent-authorisation primitive.
- Actor Attestation
- The machine-readable result describing what could be established about an interaction.
- Actor Trust Receipt
- The human-readable representation of an attestation.
- Human Control Score
- A potential confidence metric for human control: a risk and evidence signal, not a verdict.
- Actor Policy
- The rules established by the relying application.