Every agent action signed. Every delegation traced. Every revocation immediate. Kipple Labs turns the chain into audit evidence suitable for HIPAA and the EU AI Act.
Registering an agent? axisprime.ai
Most agent actions present a service account or bearer token. Nothing in the request chain ties back to a named person. When a regulator asks who authorized the action, the answer is infrastructure.
Agents inherit broad credentials and operate inside them. There is no cryptographic record of what the agent was, or was not, permitted to do at a given moment. Reconstructing authorization after the fact means email threads and Slack screenshots.
Article 12 of the EU AI Act wants a tamper-evident record. HIPAA §164.312(b) wants audit controls. Timestamped JSON with a service account does not satisfy either. It describes what happened, not who authorized it.
Three public cases from the last three years. Each shows what happens when agent actions scale without a cryptographic chain behind them.
A BC Civil Resolution Tribunal held the airline responsible for statements made by its AI chatbot. The court rejected the argument that the chatbot was a separate legal entity. Operators own their agents' output. Cross-operator scenarios will need an artifact to scope responsibility when multiple parties share the chain.
2024 · Regulatory precedentIn February 2024, Klarna announced its AI handled two-thirds of customer service chats, equivalent to 700 FTE. In May 2025, the CEO reversed the decision, citing quality. Scale of this kind requires a cross-operator accountability story that cannot yet be produced.
2024 to 2025 · Scale and reversalCNET published 77 articles under a "CNET Money Staff" byline. Forty-one required corrections. No cryptographic record existed at publication binding the content to its generating agent or the reviewing human.
2023 · Content provenanceAXIS provides the missing chain in each case. The signed artifact is the forensic difference between a hypothetical and a defense.
AXIS is an open protocol. Agents carry Ed25519 identity tokens and signed delegation credentials. Any platform receiving an agent request verifies the chain without calling a central authority. The reference registry runs at axisprime.ai. Anyone can run another.
Who is this agent?
Every agent has a keypair. Every action carries a signature. Every signature resolves to an identity record in a registry. Standard cryptography, no proprietary custody.
What is this agent allowed to do?
Delegation credentials encode scope. The chain roots at a human operator. Every link signs the one below it. Scope narrows down the chain. It cannot widen.
What has this agent done?
Signed attestations about past behavior. Stored by whoever issued them, not the registry. v0.1 does not specify aggregation. v0.3 will.
Running now. AXIS Prime is the reference registry at registry.axisprime.ai. Verification, registration, and revocation endpoints are live. The v0.1 spec is on GitHub.
The EU AI Act Kit ships Q2 2026. HIPAA Agent Governance is in active development. Each product maps one framework to the AXIS credential chain and provides the documentation auditors expect. More frameworks when we can credibly defend them.
Article 12 of the EU AI Act requires automatic event logging for high-risk AI systems. Penalty for failure: €15M or 3% of global turnover. The Kit produces the log, maps it to Annex III risk classes, and generates the technical documentation regulators expect.
Shipping Q2 2026 · Design partners openEvery AI agent touching ePHI needs a named human behind it. §164.312(b) wants audit controls. §164.312(d) wants authentication. §164.502(e) wants BAA flow-down. AXIS gives you the cryptographic version of all three. The Kit wraps it for Covered Entities and Business Associates.
In developmentFinancial services obligations. Federal contracting controls. Industry-specific audits. Internal trust-and-safety programs. We build compliance mappings and audit kits to whatever framework your organization operates under, using the same AXIS credential chains that power our HIPAA and EU AI Act kits.
One engagement covers the mapping, the evidence pipeline, and the documentation your auditor will accept.
AXIS is Apache 2.0 and will transfer to independent governance once the registry can pay for itself. Kipple Labs makes money on the compliance products built on top. Red Hat made Linux profitable without owning it. We intend the same pattern here.
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.