AI should know when not to act.

Proof-of-Silence™ is a decision-governance protocol for AI agents. It places an evidence gate between a proposed action and the governed execution path.

The decision flow

1. Proposed action — an AI system or agent proposes an action.

2. Evidence gate — configured policy evaluates whether the available evidence is sufficient.

3. Verdict — the protocol records one of four verdicts: ACT NOW, WAIT, SILENCE, or REJECT.

4. Signed record — the decision record is hashed and signed.

5. Chain — each record links to the previous record to make later modification detectable.

6. Independent verification — the supplied verifier can check the presented chain offline against the public key.

Fail closed

Missing or unverifiable evidence must not be turned into a PASS. A valid outcome can be INCONCLUSIVE or NOT EXECUTED.

What this does not mean

Cryptographic integrity does not prove that every external-world fact is true, that every AI decision was correct, or that a deployment is automatically legally compliant. Proof-of-Silence™ supports evidence, traceability, record-keeping and human-oversight workflows.