Temporal Authority Systems PBC has issued a global invitation to semiconductor manufacturers, robotics developers, insurers, researchers, and public institutions to collaborate on a proposed hardware-based foundation for human authority in the age of autonomous artificial intelligence. The invitation accompanies HUMAN INTELLIGENCE: The Final Say, a manifesto by author and inventor MAXBRUCE and GT Sage, an AI collaborator operating through OpenAI's ChatGPT. The book is available free in English and Simplified Chinese at thefinalsay.org.
The initiative matters because it proposes a technical answer to a governance question: machines may act with authority people grant, but must not possess unilateral authority to grant, extend, or restore that authority themselves. At its heart is OCUP™—the One Chip Unified Protocol—envisioned as a universal authority chip or chiplet that could help protect human safety, establish accountable machine operation, and support trusted economic participation in the autonomous era. The framework asks four questions of consequential autonomous operations: Who authorized the action? On what evidence? For how long? And who bears the financial risk?
The proposal splits into two human priorities: health and wealth. On health, OCUP is designed to place independently governed, time-limited authorization boundaries beneath software controlled by autonomous systems, preventing unilateral self-extension of operating authority, requiring independently validated renewal, and producing verifiable evidence of authorization, expiration, and attempted violations. On wealth, the same evidence infrastructure could support better-informed insurance, certification, and commercial deployment, with a proposed Quorum Validators Network giving qualified human validators defined roles in reviewing and renewing machine authority. The company describes these as prospective benefits to be developed and tested, not outcomes already achieved.
The documented first step is limited. Temporal Authority Systems has completed an FPGA hardware-control demonstration on an AMD Kria KR260 development board. In the recorded Phase I experiment, a host-driven authorization sequence was granted, then closed, and did not reopen during the observation window, including after deliberate reassertion of the same sequence. STATUS 0x1060 was observed for five seconds, with the reopen indicator remaining clear. The company states this bounded result does not demonstrate the complete OCUP architecture or non-bypassable control of a physical resource, and that further work must evaluate independent authority inputs, measured lease expiration, hardware resource gating, tamper-resistant evidence, and resistance to host or system-level bypass. Use of the AMD development board does not imply an AMD partnership or endorsement.
"We've taken OCUP from a governance concept into documented, early-stage hardware experimentation," said MAXBRUCE, founder of Temporal Authority Systems PBC. "Now we're inviting chipmakers, robotics companies, insurers, and governments to help us take the next step." The company welcomes collaboration with semiconductor and FPGA developers evaluating a licensable authority chiplet, robotics and autonomous-system developers conducting adversarial authorization pilots, insurers examining verifiable authority evidence, and standards organizations, researchers, and policymakers reviewing the proposed frameworks. Fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory licensing is a stated objective for relevant standardized technology.
The manifesto also presents a discussion draft of the Human Authority Treaty, proposing a cooperative international framework for machine identity, authorization, and evidence across national jurisdictions without displacing the laws or enforcement authority of individual states. It draws procedural inspiration from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Patent Cooperation Treaty. The company is making efforts to reach relevant United Nations representatives and diplomatic missions, while stating these outreach efforts do not imply UN or WIPO endorsement, initiated treaty negotiations, or agreement to sponsor the proposal.
The broader initiative includes Talkspresso, an emerging platform for live, human-led conversations with multiple AI collaborators, with outreach sessions for schools, universities, and community organizations planned. The manifesto also invites public participation through a free challenge in which seven AIs were asked to write ten commandments for the AIs of the world, with their identities hidden. Readers can take the free AI Commandments Challenge and submit their Final Say at https://thefinalsay.org/commandments/.
