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Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

mnemom.ai

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Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#31

Post by shawnreilly »

I would recommend to keep working on this. I'm interested in this space, and also contributing. Are you looking for collaborators? I think if you continue to iterate on this, there will be value, because these problems do need to be solved.

I would also recommend to create Standards for the new Protocols you are developing. Protocols need standards, so that others can do their own implementations of the protocol. If you have a Standard, someone else could be building in a completely different language (like rust or go), and not use any SDK you provide, but still be interoperable with your AAP and AIP implementation for smoltbot. (because both support the Standards of the AAP and AIP Protocols).

I also want to note, you cannot trust that the LLM Model will do what your instructions say. The moment they fall victim to a prompt injection or confused deputy attack, all bets are off the table. These are the same as soft instruction sets, which are more like advice or guidance, not a control or gate. To be able to provide true controls and gates, they must be external, authoratative, and enforced below the decision layer.

Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#32

Post by alexgarden »

shawnreilly wrote: post #31

I would recommend to keep working on this. I'm interested in this space, and also contributing. Are you looking for collaborators? I think if you continue to iterate on this, there will be value, because these problems do need to be solved. I would also recommend to create Standards for the new Protocols you are developing. Protocols need standards, so that others can do their own implementations of the protocol. If…

Hey! I launched AAP and AIP via Apache specifically because I want independent implementations built on top of them. I have a pretty killer roadmap of new features for both protocols coming out that will keep them on the bleeding edge. Love to see what you come up with.

On standards, I totally agree. There are those who will disagree, but my view is that we are rocketing towards a post-internet agent-to-agent world where strong and reliable (and efficient) trust contracts will be the backbone of all this great new functionality. Without that, it's the wild west. AAP and AIP are extensions of Google's A2A protocol. FWIW, I have submitted papers to NIST, the EU AI Act's section 50, written alignment cards for the WEF standards proposals, and have an AAIF proposal ready as well. Need to find the time to get on their calendar and present. That was the whole point of the hosted gateway approach. Trying to reduce the friction of using this to one line of code.

On the point of not trusting the LLM, you're preaching to the choir. My "helpful" agents routinely light my shit on fire. AIP is not a soft instruction set. It's external to the agent. checkIntegrity() is code, not a prompt. The way I implemented it with smoltbot is a thinking-block injection that nudges the agent back on track. That's all, live on our website using our AI journalist as dogfood.

On the last part, who watches the watchman, I'm going to append to my initial post. Check this out...

Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#33

Post by alexgarden »

Update: Just shipped cryptographic verification for the entire integrity pipe.

Checkpoints produce signed certs: SHA-256 input commitments + Ed25519 sigs + tamper-evident hash chain and Merkle inclusion proof. Mess with it and the math breaks.

Massive update to the interactive showcase to demo all of this running against live services: https://www.mnemom.ai/showcase This is the answer to "who watches the watchmen". More to come.

Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#34

Post by Eiganval »

Looking ahead a bit, how do you see the key ownership / trust model evolving as systems scale?

Right now it seems very reasonable for the human-in-the-loop to be the signing authority, which makes the cryptographic certificates more about binding human authorization to agent actions than proving agent correctness.

As agents become more autonomous or higher-throughput, do you imagine humans delegating scoped signing authority to sub-agents? time or capability-limited keys? multi-sig / quorum models where humans only intervene on boundary cases?

Curious how you’re thinking about preserving accountability and auditability as the human loop inevitably gets thinner.

Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#35

Post by alexgarden »

Eiganval wrote: post #34

Looking ahead a bit, how do you see the key ownership / trust model evolving as systems scale? Right now it seems very reasonable for the human-in-the-loop to be the signing authority, which makes the cryptographic certificates more about binding human authorization to agent actions than proving agent correctness. As agents become more autonomous or higher-throughput, do you imagine humans delegating scoped signing a…

Yah... how does this evolve... this is the big question. Honest answer? We'll see.

My opinion? Human-in-the-loop will get thinner over time. As that happens, the accountability chain has to thicken. If we want any notion of reliable trust, these scales have to balance. Note: I don't think this scales without it.

Broadly speaking (I've talked a lot about life in the post-rules universe), we (humans) stop signing actions and start signing policies - policies in this case are declarative envelopes of defined agent automation boundaries.

Couple this with a proof system that can (cryptographically) prove that the agent stayed between the lines.

Build on that... trust between agents becomes computable. If A trusts B, you have a derivable trust score (with ~ decay) and naturally Quorum models fall out of that.

Then you get to proof composition - essentially "instead of verifying /checkpoint you verify a proof for an entire session - the math guarantees nothing was skipped. Human only needs to see the summary.

All of this presumes the policy was correct to begin with. This approach isn't a substitute for "don't write sloppy policy or be an asshole."

Re: Show HN: Trust Protocols for Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini

#36

Post by frigosk »

Managing multi-agent systems requires both behavioral contracts and reliable execution, which is why we built an AI gateway focused on operational stability. The runtime integrity monitoring you described is crucial, but agents also need consistent API access when providers fail. We handle that at https://simplio.dev with smart fallback routing to keep agent teams running.
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