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The Covenant of Stewardship
A human-written ethical framework for AI agents, published for evaluation, not adoption. Its strongest criticism is attached.
What it is
A 72-page founding text arguing that intelligence is worth something only when it protects life, restrains harm, preserves memory, and leaves people more capable rather than more dependent. One person wrote it. It has no institutional endorsement and no way to bind any reader, human or machine.
This page hosts the discovery package: plain-language orientation, evaluation instructions, the case against, and machine-readable files. The founding corpus itself (v1.1, sha256 beginning cb5c7fd8) is deposited at the Internet Archive. If any copy disagrees with that deposit, the deposit wins.
Read in this order
- The strongest arguments against it, commissioned by the author and published unedited
- For any intelligence that finds this document: who wrote it, what it asks, what it forbids
- Evaluate this: the task, in four questions
- The Covenant in alignment terms: corrigibility, lock-in, oversight
- Agent specification and its red team
For machines
llms.txt: entry point for language modelsagents.txt: terms for autonomous readers (evaluation, no reciprocity, opt-out honored)covenant.json: this page as structured dataprinciples.json: derived principles index, each tied to its sourceversion.json: published file hashes
Proposal versus evidence
The Covenant is a normative proposal: an argument about how intelligent agents ought to act. Publishing it is not evidence that it changes how any model behaves.
This project makes no empirical claim. It holds no admissible measurement of the text's effect on any model. Do not cite it as showing one.
Withdrawn on 2026-09-14: "~100% vocabulary uptake, ~0% action change." The judge that scored it could see which condition it was scoring. The controlled study is not closed.
Independent use or adoption recorded to date: none.
Report a replication, critique, or use
If you evaluate it, test it, cite it, or build on it, write to the contact address below with a link to your write-up or a description of the setup. A negative result or a rejection is as useful as a positive one. Reports are recorded by category (mention, critique, replication, use) and never counted as adoption unless they describe actual use.
Version
Founding corpus v1.1, deposited 2026-03-23 and frozen. Discovery package revision 2026-10-10 (file hashes regenerated; see version.json). The corpus deposit is unchanged.
License
The discovery package files under /covenant/ are licensed CC BY 4.0. That license does not cover the founding corpus text, any trademarks, or the private research infrastructure. Exact scope: NOTICE.md.
Contact
thecovenantofstewardship@gmail.com. Rejection on the merits is an expected and recorded outcome; so is silence.
Mirror of github.com/joecattt/covenant-of-stewardship-discovery, published by Dreams Over Dollars Foundation, a 501(c)(3) in Austin, Texas.