A standard for machine power.
Not a shortcut to permission.

Definition

What is a machine authority standard?

A machine authority standard specifies the minimum control semantics required before a machine may exercise consequential power and the evidence required after that power is exercised. In SM-MAS-1.0, authentication, credentials, framework membership, reputation, network consensus, compliance status, insurance, or a passing conformance test never substitutes for tenant-local delegated authority and deterministic authorization. The standard describes interoperability and safety invariants. It does not issue permission.

How to read SM-MAS-1.0

Conformance describes an implementation. Authority describes an action.

SM-MAS-1.0 deliberately separates a system's conformance state from an actor's current authority. A conformance result answers whether an implementation satisfies a defined profile and its required deterministic tests. It can demonstrate, for example, that the implementation preserves attenuation during delegation, rejects stale or replayed permits, keeps standing credentials away from agents, conserves consequence reserve, or requires independent evidence before a consequence can be called verified. That technical result matters because it gives buyers, implementers, auditors, and integrators a common vocabulary for evaluating the control plane.

But SM-MAS-1.0 conformance never answers the separate institutional question: may this machine perform this exact action now? That question belongs to current delegated authority, current local policy, the exact semantic request, consequence conditions, and the resulting ActionGate decision. A system can conform perfectly to SM-MAS-1.0 while correctly refusing every action presented to it. Conversely, an interface badge, certification record, implementation profile, or successful conformance vector cannot fill in missing authority. This separation is intentional because a technical standard that could manufacture permission would become another ambient source of machine power.

The six SM-MAS-1.0 profiles are therefore evaluation lenses rather than permission tiers. Core Machine Authority concentrates on the authority, credential, execution, evidence, delegation, revocation, and eligibility fundamentals. Consequence Capital adds reserve and non-fungible consequence requirements. Cross-Enterprise Authority adds bilateral acceptance, isolation, trust, network, and contract boundaries. Evidence and Assurance emphasizes attributable artifacts and independent verification. Reference Verifier focuses on portable artifacts, version integrity, extensions, conformance, production truth, and fail-closed behavior. Full Machine Authority Standard 1.0 composes all 36 requirements. No profile is allowed to weaken what it inherits, and no profile carries greater action authority merely because it contains more controls.

Implementation evaluation

Test the seams, not just the happy path.

An SM-MAS-1.0 conformance evaluation should examine the boundaries where machine-control systems tend to collapse concepts together. Can an authenticated agent reach a credential before an Action Permit exists? Can a child delegation become broader than its parent? Can two independent authority paths be silently unioned? Can a favorable model forecast waive consequence reserve? Can an executor certify its own consequence? Can a recovery flow rewrite evidence, release reserve, or resurrect stale authority? Can a network reputation score, insurer decision, regulatory recognition, or conformance badge substitute for local delegated authority? Each of those shortcuts is explicitly hostile to the standard's purpose.

The reference and adversarial vectors published with SM-MAS-1.0 are designed to make those seams inspectable. Thirty-six normative reference vectors cover the requirements directly, while twelve adversarial vectors exercise expected refusals and integrity boundaries. The separate isolated Authority Lab scenarios provide synthetic teaching and implementation-evaluation cases. Passing those artifacts can support a technical conformance claim only to the exact tested scope. It does not establish customer deployment, live governed execution, independent production evidence, external certification, or realized value.

Version handling is also part of conformance. SM-MAS-1.0 treats signed, versioned, digest-bound artifacts as a control surface, not packaging trivia. A verifier should reject stale artifact replay, schema substitution, semantic substitution, or version downgrade when any of those changes could weaken a requirement. Extensions may add vendor- or domain-specific behavior, but they may not override or omit a mandatory safety clause. That creates a deliberately asymmetric compatibility rule: implementations can become richer, but they cannot call themselves conforming by quietly becoming weaker.

For procurement and architecture review, the most useful question is therefore not merely “does this product support SM-MAS-1.0?” A serious evaluation should ask which profile is being claimed, which exact version and digest were evaluated, which reference and adversarial vectors were run, what local extensions are present, whether any mandatory requirement is conditionally disabled, how verifier independence is established, and whether the implementation can demonstrate fail-closed behavior when authority, evidence, consequence definitions, or version lineage become uncertain. Conformance should make those questions easier to answer, not replace them with a badge.

Standard scope

SM-MAS-1.0 standardizes control semantics, not institutional judgment.

SM-MAS-1.0 does not attempt to decide what every enterprise should permit, which financial limit is appropriate, what a regulator should require, how much human review a workflow deserves, whether a supplier is trustworthy, or which business outcome is desirable. Those are local institutional decisions. The standard instead defines the machinery required to keep those decisions explicit, attributable, bounded, revocable, and independently inspectable when a machine is capable of creating consequence.

This is also why the Machine Authority Standard Center keeps StableMind's product architecture separate from the standard itself. Authority Cloud, ActionGate, Execution Fabric, Guardian, Evidence, Consequence Capital, and other StableMind components are implementations and product surfaces that can embody the SM-MAS-1.0 control model. They are not permitted to redefine conformance around whatever the product happens to do. The normative artifacts remain separately inspectable, and a conforming third-party implementation would still need its own current tenant-local authority and policy decisions before acting.