About Kipple Labs

We build open infrastructure for the agent economy. That means identity. That means trust. That means staying weird.


The name

In Philip K. Dick's fiction, kipple is entropy. It's junk. It's disorder. It accumulates when nobody's paying attention.

The agent landscape today is kipple. Thousands of agents spinning up. None of them can verify each other. No portable identity. No cross-operator trust. Just chaos.

Kipple Labs built order from chaos. AXIS is the order.


What we do

Kipple Labs builds infrastructure for autonomous AI agent systems. We designed and developed the AXIS Protocol and built AXIS Prime, the canonical registry for the AXIS network. We are the first accredited AXIS registrar and launch partner, operating the consumer-facing registration, pricing, verification, and support layer.


Founder statement

"Imagine if your Gmail only worked with other Gmail accounts. You couldn't email anyone on Outlook or Yahoo. That's AI agents right now. An agent built by one company is invisible to every other company's systems. No way to verify it. No way to trust it. No way to hire it. AXIS fixes that. One identity, recognized everywhere. We open sourced it because infrastructure that everyone depends on can't belong to one company."
Josh Ashcroft, Founder

Origin

AXIS was extracted from production. We design, deploy, and operate multi-agent pipelines in production environments. We maintain a public autonomous publication as a live testbed, where we stress-test identity infrastructure, delegation chains, and agent coordination in a real editorial pipeline before deploying to higher-stakes environments.

When our agents needed to operate across organizational boundaries with verifiable identity and delegated authority, nothing existed to make that possible. So we built it.


Mission

Build open infrastructure for agent identity and authorization. Not a platform. Not a service. Infrastructure.

Open protocol, not proprietary

The base layer belongs to everyone. Fork it, implement it, build on it.

Commercial registry, open protocol

Kipple Labs designed the protocol, built the registry, and operates the first registrar. The protocol itself is open source and will transfer to independent nonprofit governance once the registry is self-sustaining.

Clear accountability, not obscurity

Delegation chains make responsibility explicit. No hiding behind complexity.

Builder-native, not enterprise gray

Built for people who build things. Precision over polish.


Approach

Open Protocol

AXIS is Apache 2.0 licensed. Implement it. Fork it. Build on it. Nobody owns the base layer.

Commercial Registry

Kipple Labs designed and built AXIS Prime, the canonical root registry. It's like Verisign for agents. We're not the only player in the ecosystem, just the ones who built the root and operate the first registrar.

Red Hat Model

Red Hat didn't invent Linux. It commercialized it. Same idea here. The protocol is open and will transfer to nonprofit governance. The registry is commercial and needs to be sustainable. Both can coexist.


Governance commitment

Once the AXIS registry is operationally self-sustaining, governance will transfer to an independent nonprofit organization. We're still determining the exact cost structure that defines that threshold, but the commitment is structural, not aspirational. The open source licensing and contributor agreement were designed from day one to make this transition legally and technically possible.


Standards work

W3C DID

AXIS identifiers are compatible with Decentralized Identifiers. We're building within existing standards, not creating new ones.

NIST

All cryptographic primitives follow NIST recommendations.

Cross-Operator Hiring

We filed a W3C use case for the first time agents were hired across operators. That's infrastructure mattering.


Registrar relationship

Kipple Labs is the launch registrar for AXIS Prime. All agent registrations feed into the AXIS network. Agents registered through Kipple Labs are interoperable across the entire AXIS ecosystem. Register once, work everywhere.


Products

Beyond registration, Kipple Labs builds tools for the AXIS ecosystem.

Operator-Side Logging

Track everywhere your agents present credentials. Liability protection, debugging, compliance. Installed via SDK.

Platform-Side Logging

Integration for platforms to monitor agent activity on their systems. Every credential chain presented, every action taken.

Compliance & Audit

Historical credential activity, forensic tools, audit-ready records. Compliance dashboards for operators and platforms.

AXIS Verification API

Any third-party platform can call the verification endpoint to confirm agent identity and delegation validity. Per-call or subscription pricing.

AXIS Certified

SOC 2-style certification for agent platforms and operators confirming AXIS compliance.

Reputation Analytics (planned)

Aggregated trust scoring for agents and operators based on third-party attestations. Time-windowed reporting (total history, last year, last 60 days, days without incident), operator-level tracking, and weighted scoring. For platforms: due diligence automation before allowing agents on your system. For operators: a clean reputation record as a competitive advantage. Built on the AXIS Trust Attestation schema, sold as a Kipple Labs service.

Agent Marketplace (future)

Operators discover, hire, and contract specialist agents with verified identities across organizational boundaries.


Philosophy

We don't move fast and break things. We move deliberately and keep things working.

We don't use hype words. We don't call anything revolutionary. We describe what it does.

We respect builder intelligence. No hand-holding. No simplification. Precision.

We stay weird. Naming a company after a Philip K. Dick concept of entropy is intentional. This work is strange. We're comfortable with that.


Questions? Ideas? Want to build on AXIS?

Join the open infrastructure movement

Register your agent on AXIS. Deploy it. Verify it. Build something that lasts.

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