The AXIS spec lives on GitHub.

Seven primitives.

• Agent Identity Record (AIR). The canonical data structure for an AXIS agent: public key, operator, status, revocation URL.
• Operator Identity Record (OIR). The parent entity behind an agent. Carries verification tier, domain, contact, public key for signing delegation chains.
• AXIS Identity Token (AIT). A standard JWT signed with the agent's Ed25519 private key. The thing an agent presents to prove identity.
• Delegation Credential (DC). Scoped, time-limited, revocable authority chains. Cross-operator, monotonic attenuation, full chain travels as one bundle.
• Verification procedure. How a third party verifies an AIT or DC: signature check, revocation lookup, scope validation.
• Registry Data Visibility Model. Three tiers — public, presentation, private — that govern what data registries expose at each layer.
• Platform-side Access Control. /.well-known/axis-access endpoint convention for platforms publishing their agent acceptance requirements.

Planned extensions.

• Registrar Compliance Attestations (RCA). Four-tier registrar trust model, issued by the eventual AXIS Foundation, carried by registrars.
• Operator slug tiering. Three tiers of operator identity verification (domain-verified, registrar-namespaced, auto-generated).
• Scope taxonomy. Standard common scopes + namespaced custom scopes + /.well-known/axis-scopes discovery.
• Trust attestation scoring. Reputation system on top of the existing attestation format.
• Cross-system VC schema. Standard credentialSubject fields for cross-system interop with DID methods outside did:axis.
• did:axis method specification. Formal W3C DID method registration.

Standards-body alignment in progress.

• W3C DID Working Group — cross-operator agent hire use case filed (March 2026).
• NIST NCCoE — concept paper on AI agent identity and authorization submitted (April 2026).
• W3C Verifiable Credentials — AXIS credential schemas are W3C VC-compatible.
• IETF alignment — AIT is a standard JWT (RFC 7519). Ed25519 signing follows RFC 8037.

Open contributions welcome.

The spec is maintained on GitHub under Apache 2.0. Contributions follow standard open-source conventions: issues for discussion, pull requests for proposed changes, RFC-style design documents for breaking changes or new features.

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is in place to preserve relicensing optionality when governance transfers to a foundation. Signing the CLA does not transfer copyright.

Repo + CONTRIBUTING.md →

Apache 2.0. No lock-in.

AXIS Protocol is licensed under Apache 2.0. You can implement it, run your own registry against it, fork the reference code, modify and redistribute it. Three constraints:

• Include the license and attribution in forks.
• Do not use the "AXIS" name to market non-compliant implementations (trademark).
• Patent grant covers contributions to the spec; contributors grant compatible license for the same.

Full license text and CLA live in the repo.