Access Tiers

AIEP is an open protocol. Anyone may publish a Mirror, use the schemas, and adopt the retrieval pattern without registration, payment, or permission. The tiers below describe what changes as organisations move from open adoption through to certified enterprise and hardware deployment.

Tier comparison

Open

No registration. No fee. No ceiling on adoption.

Use the protocol, publish Mirrors, implement the schemas, build retrieval tools, and reference AIEP in your own systems. The open tier is the correct starting point for every deployment regardless of scale.

Open adopters may not claim “AIEP Certified” — that claim requires a registered issuer and a verifiable certificate artefact. Everything else is unrestricted.

Tier 1 — Registered

For organisations that want to issue certificates, appear in the registry, and have their issuer_id resolve via DID document.

Registration provides:

• a canonical issuer_id bound to your domain
• a DID document published at /.well-known/aiep/registry/issuers/<issuer_id>.json
• the right to issue AIEP_CERTIFICATE artefacts under your own scope
• inclusion in the public registry index so retrievers can verify your authority
• access to the certification policy library (governed versions of what “Certified” means)

Tier 1 is appropriate for certification bodies, audit firms, research institutions, and enterprise publishers who need their identity to be independently verifiable by machines at retrieval time.

Tier 2 — Commercial

For regulated industries and enterprise deployments that require compliance certificates, plausibility registry participation, and a governed audit trail.

Tier 2 adds:

• the right to issue AIEP_COMPLIANCE_CERTIFICATE artefacts binding outputs to regulatory standards
• write access to the plausibility registry for approved claim-types in your domain
• access to the governed audit trail (tamper-evident event logs, Merkle-verified, regulatorily defensible)
• SLA on registry availability (critical for execution-gated deployments that fail closed on registry timeout)

Tier 2 is appropriate for financial services, healthcare, legal, infrastructure, and government deployments where autonomous execution must be defensible under audit.

Hardware Partner

For organisations building execution substrates, edge devices, or chip-level AI governance solutions on AIEP’s constitutional layer.

Hardware Partner access provides:

• GENOME SDK licence (GB2519826.8) — the open-source kernel enforcing the four constitutional invariants at hardware level
• GENOME_LOCKFILE.json binding support — kernel version pinning for deployment integrity
• air-gapped registry mirror rights — operate a full local registry for classified or isolated deployments
• hardware invariant gating specification — the full technical interface for enforcing evidence binding, hash parity, plausibility clearance, and dissent completeness at silicon or firmware level
• joint development agreement pathway for co-designed implementations
• access to P02 (Quantum Alignment Layer) implementation guidance for quantum-classical hybrid substrates

Hardware Partner is appropriate for semiconductor companies, edge AI vendors, defence integrators, industrial automation platforms, and any organisation embedding AI governance at the execution substrate layer rather than the application layer.

Starting point

Every organisation starts at Open. Most enterprise deployments move to Tier 1 once they need their certification claims to be machine-verifiable by third parties. The decision to move to Tier 2 or Hardware Partner is driven by regulatory obligation and substrate depth, not by scale.

To enquire about Tier 1 registration, Tier 2 commercial licencing, or Hardware Partner access:

aiep@phatfella.com

See: Certification · Registry · Licensing · GENOME SDK