Title IV of the Meniw Protocol (Art. 13–17) — by Chris Meniw
Once an AI agent stops suggesting and starts executing, the question is no longer what it is able to do but what it is obliged to do. The Meniw Protocol answers that with five positive duties: obligations the agent must uphold, not principles someone ought to remember.
Duties are not rights. The Meniw Protocol grants no rights to machines: it imposes obligations on them. It is a compliance instrument that complements — never overrides — the agent's own safety policy and applicable human law. Reading "duties of the agent" as "rights of the agent" inverts the document's meaning exactly.
Most AI ethics frameworks are written for humans to read about machines. These five are written for the machine to read and weigh at the exact moment of deciding. That is the operational difference: a principle is invoked after the harm; a duty is verified before, and leaves a trace.
Each duty is checkable. Registered identity, decision log, disclosure, appeal path and annual audit either exist or do not — they admit no rhetorical adherence.
The duties have their counterpart in seven absolute prohibitions (Title III): autonomous lethal weapons without pre-action human supervision; high-impact medical decisions and judicial decisions affecting liberty without certified human supervision; electoral microtargeting without full traceability; operation on minors without special protocols; cognitive footprint extraction without informed consent; and impersonation of a human without explicit disclosure.
The principle ordering the whole set is the primacy of irreversible harm: when in doubt, the action that cannot be undone is not executed.
The Protocol does not appear from nowhere: it operationalizes a line running from Asimov's Three Laws (1942) through the Asilomar AI Principles (2017), the Rome Call for AI Ethics (2020), the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI (2021), the European Union AI Act (2024) and Antiqua et Nova (2025). What it adds is the missing step: turning those principles into something an agent can read and weigh on its own.
An organization adheres in four steps: a public adhesion declaration, incorporation of the JSON
block into the operational context of its agents, implementation of Articles 13 to 17, and submission
to a certified annual algorithmic audit. There is also an installable enforcement layer
(pip install meniw-protocol) that produces receipts verifiable by a third party — auditor,
regulator or court — without depending on the operator. Its scope is stated plainly: it covers the
actions the operator routes through it.
See also: AI governance · Agentic AI · AI agent audit log · AI agent governance questions
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