Temporal Authority Systems PBC today introduced OCUP, the One Chip Unified Protocol, a pre-production Runtime Authority evidence architecture being developed to establish time-bounded authority leases, multi-party validator consensus, fail-closed boundaries, and tamper-evident evidence for autonomous systems. OCUP's current commercial offering is a paid benchmark, audit, and technical due-diligence program. It is not yet a production safety controller, live distributed validator network, hardware-enforced deployment, insurance approval, or third-party certification.
The program is designed to help organizations test a foundational question before live deployment: Can an autonomous system be prevented from indefinitely extending, enlarging, or restoring its own operational authority and can the resulting grant, denial, expiration, degradation, quarantine, or recovery decision be proven? Temporal Authority Systems PBC is initially opening paid pilot participation to insurers, technical underwriting teams, robotics manufacturers, autonomous fleet operators, and strategic evaluators.
OCUP addresses a different layer than existing systems focused on identity, access, monitoring, cybersecurity, or post-incident logging. Authentication asks who or what is making a request. Access control asks whether that actor has permission. Observability records what the system reports. Runtime Authority asks whether that permission should still exist now, under current conditions, for this specific capability. Under the OCUP model, authority is limited in time; high-risk actions may require stronger validator consensus; loss of communication cannot expand authority; stale or replayed approvals cannot restore authority; lease expiration produces denial or bounded degradation; critical recovery requires fresh authorization; autonomous systems cannot approve their own indefinite continuation; and material authority events generate tamper-evident evidence.
The current pre-production evidence harness is implemented in Rust to support deterministic execution, memory-safe systems development, reproducible benchmark testing, and tamper-evident audit generation. It is a software reference implementation, not yet a production hardware-enforcement deployment. As autonomous systems move into factories, roads, warehouses, financial networks, and human-shared environments, organizations face growing questions around liability, insurability, technical due diligence, and regulatory accountability. Traditional logs may show what software reports after an event. OCUP's Runtime Authority model is designed to produce a structured record of the authority decision itself, including the identity of the governed system, the authority lease in effect, the capability being requested, the applicable time boundary, validator participation and quorum state, the reason for approval or denial, the behavior following expiration or loss of quorum, and evidence associated with degradation, quarantine, and recovery.
At the center of the OCUP pilot program is a benchmark designed to test self-extension denial proof, generating a deterministic evidence record showing that an autonomous system attempted to continue or enlarge its authority beyond an authorized temporal boundary—and that the request was denied without relying on the system's voluntary compliance. Additional benchmark families include lease expiration and fail-closed behavior, validator-quorum loss, network partition and communication failure, stale approval and replay rejection, quarantine initiation and release, phased recovery, deterministic replay, evidence-chain integrity, and gradual capability reduction under deteriorating conditions.
OCUP's paid pilots are structured as pre-production benchmark, audit, and technical due-diligence engagements. The program currently includes three commercial levels: the Reference Evidence Pilot, a 90-day engagement for organizations seeking a company-specific Runtime Authority Evidence Report; the Integration Evidence Pilot, a 90- to 120-day engagement incorporating client-specific scenarios; and the Strategic Anchor Program, a 120- to 180-day engagement for major industry participants. Each engagement is designed to convert tested autonomous-system authority behavior into a commercially usable evidence package. For insurers, the immediate question is whether autonomous risk can be observed, benchmarked, and priced with greater technical confidence. For robotics companies, the question is what authority remains during network loss or sensor uncertainty. For autonomous fleets, the question is whether degraded conditions cause capabilities to narrow safely. For enterprise AI platforms, the question is whether agents can be prevented from indefinitely renewing credentials. For financial institutions, the question is whether high-risk digital actions can be contained pending fresh consensus.
Temporal Authority Systems PBC was formed around a long-term public-benefit mission to preserve humanity's seat at the table as autonomous systems gain greater operational power. That does not mean requiring a person to manually approve every machine action, but establishing a boundary that machines do not control. 'Human control cannot depend solely on whether an autonomous system chooses to obey,' said Max Davis, Founder and CEO of Temporal Authority Systems PBC. 'The boundary must exist outside the system's discretion.' Organizations interested in evaluating OCUP's Runtime Authority Evidence Pilots can visit OCUP.ai, pilot.OCUP.ai, or evidence.OCUP.ai.
