Temporal Authority Systems PBC today introduced OCUP, the One Chip Unified Protocol, a pre-production Runtime Authority evidence architecture designed to establish time-bounded authority leases, multi-party validator consensus, fail-closed boundaries, and tamper-evident evidence for autonomous systems. The current commercial offering is a paid benchmark, audit, and technical due-diligence program, not yet a production safety controller or live distributed validator network.
The program aims 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 what the company calls the Runtime Authority layer, which differs from traditional identity, access control, or observability systems. Under the OCUP model, authority is limited in time, high-risk actions 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.
At the center of the OCUP pilot program is a benchmark designed to test Self-Extension Denial Proof, which generates 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.
The paid pilots are structured as pre-production benchmark, audit, and technical due-diligence engagements, not production safety certifications or insurance approvals. The program includes three commercial levels: Reference Evidence Pilot (90-day engagement), Integration Evidence Pilot (90–120 days), and Strategic Anchor Program (120–180 days). 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 rather than expand unpredictably. 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. For defense and aerospace systems, the question is whether machine execution can remain subordinate to authenticated command authority.
"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. OCUP is being built to make that boundary time-bounded, validator-governed, fail-closed, and provable."
The longer-term path includes HSM-backed key custody, secure elements and hardware enforcement, trusted monotonic time and state, distributed validator networks, remote attestation, production telemetry adapters, certified evidence formats, insurer and regulator acceptance, sector-specific Runtime Authority standards, and integration and licensing across autonomous-system ecosystems. Early pilot participants may help shape the benchmark families, evidence requirements, integration models, and commercial standards that define this emerging category.
Organizations interested in evaluating OCUP's Runtime Authority Evidence Pilots can visit OCUP.ai, pilot.ocup.ai, and evidence.ocup.ai.
