We built AXIS, the open cross-operator identity protocol for autonomous agents. AXIS Prime is the reference registry. Our commercial products span runtime enforcement, signed attribution, and audit-ready compliance for HIPAA and the EU AI Act.
AXIS signs the delegation behind every agent action and ties it back to the human who authorized it. We build commercial products on that foundation across three surfaces: runtime enforcement that bounds agent misbehavior to denied calls at the egress chokepoint, attribution that roots forensic evidence in non-repudiable delegation, and compliance kits that wrap both into the documentation regulators and auditors expect.
Runtime products (Gateway, SDK) in active development for Q3 2026. EU AI Act Kit ships Q2 2026. HIPAA Agent Governance in development. Custom-framework engagements available now.
In Philip K. Dick's fiction, kipple is entropy. It is junk. It is disorder. It accumulates when nobody is paying attention.
The agent landscape today is kipple. Thousands of agents spinning up. Nothing can verify any of them. No portable identity, no cross-operator trust, no audit trail. Just chaos.
Kipple Labs builds structure. AXIS is the structure.
"Imagine if your Gmail only worked with other Gmail accounts. You couldn't email anyone on Outlook or Yahoo. That's AI agents today. An agent built by one company has no identity other companies can verify.
AXIS fixes the identity problem. One identity, recognized everywhere. We open-sourced it because infrastructure that everyone depends on cannot belong to one company.
The harder problems sit on top of that foundation. When an agent acts, what stops it from doing something catastrophic? When something does go wrong, can we prove who authorized it? When a regulator asks, can we hand them evidence that holds up? Our commercial products answer those questions. The protocol stays open. The products are how we pay for the work."
Josh Ashcroft · Founder, Kipple Labs
We run an autonomous news organization. Five agents, real editorial boundaries, real deadlines. When our agents had to hire external agents with scoped authority and verifiable identity, no existing protocol could represent the chain.
We specified it. We built it. We published it. The publication is still the testbed.
Linux is open; Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Amazon Linux, and every cloud distribution are commercial. PostgreSQL is open; Crunchy Data, EDB, Supabase, Aiven, and every major managed offering are commercial. DNS is open; Verisign, Cloudflare, Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, and GoDaddy are commercial. Protocol-layer interoperability produces network effects. Product-layer competition produces commercial defensibility.
AXIS is Apache 2.0 and lives at github.com/MachinesOfDesire/axis-protocol. Anyone can implement a compliant registry. Our revenue comes from the runtime, attribution, and compliance products built on top, not the protocol underneath. Our protocol belongs to the ecosystem.
The Apache 2.0 licensing and the contributor agreement were set up so that once AXIS Prime covers its operating costs, governance moves to an independent nonprofit.
AXIS sits inside the identity, credential, and compliance standards organizations already depend on. We are building with existing infrastructure.
Identifiers are compatible with W3C DID Core. Agents resolve as did:axis:{registry}:{agent}.
Identity tokens follow RFC 7519, signed with EdDSA per RFC 8037. Ed25519 throughout.
AXIS was submitted to the NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence as a concept paper for its agent identity process on April 1, 2026.
Designed to support the EU AI Act Article 12 automatic event recording and traceability requirements for high-risk AI systems.
AXIS maps to the Security Rule's technical safeguards: unique identification, authentication, audit controls, access management.
Move-fast-and-break-things does not survive infrastructure work. Systems that bound agent behavior at runtime, or produce evidence regulators rely on, have to keep working. We move slow enough that things keep working.
We describe what things do. We do not call them revolutionary. If the work is good, the work speaks. If it is not, better words will not help.
We respect builder intelligence. No hand-holding, no simplification, no enterprise gray. Precision is the product.
Naming a company after a Philip K. Dick concept of entropy is intentional. This work is strange. We are comfortable with that.