Kepil

Accountability layer for AI agents. Give every agent a passport, put every action through one gate, and keep a log that cannot be rewritten afterwards.

53% of organisations have had an AI agent exceed its intended permissions. 48% of agents in production run with no monitoring at all. Only 22% treat an agent as an entity with its own identity. — Cloud Security Alliance and State of AI Agent Security, 2026

Kepil is what the other 78% are missing: identity, mandate, enforcement, evidence — and the part nobody else does, undo.

pip install kepil
python -m kepil.admin        # http://localhost:7317

Русская версия: README.ru.md

What it does

Passport. Every agent version gets an immutable card: who built it, who runs it, what it does, what it will never do, its risk class, its autonomy class, its limits, and when its risks are due for review. A new version is a new card; the old one is kept forever.

Mandate. A machine-readable power of attorney for one job: allowed actions, allowed systems, spending limits, a validity window, and which action types must be confirmed by a human. Anything not explicitly allowed is refused.

Gate. The single point through which an agent touches the outside world. Every action is checked against the mandate before a model is even called. Fail-closed: any error inside the check means refusal, never a pass.

Journal. Append-only JSONL where every record carries the hash of the one before it. Editing or deleting a record is detectable — by anyone, using an independent implementation:

npx @proofbyte/agent-trace verify data/journal.jsonl

Undo. The journal is a graph of actions, and every profession declares its compensating action. Kepil walks that graph backwards and stops honestly at the first step that cannot be undone. Agent platforms record what happened; this one puts it back.

Confirmations on your phone. Irreversible actions arrive in Telegram with two buttons — approve or return — so being accountable does not mean sitting at a laptop.

Use it from any MCP client

Kepil ships an MCP server, so an editor, an assistant or another agent can work through it — and every action still passes the same gate into the same journal.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "kepil": { "command": "python", "args": ["-m", "kepil.mcp"] }
  }
}

Seven tools: list professions, create an order, run a step, read order status, see what is waiting for a human, verify the journal, read an agent passport.

One tool is deliberately missing: confirmation. If a model could approve an irreversible action, the human would drop out of the chain and the whole design would be pointless. The confirmation card goes to a person — in the panel or in Telegram — and no MCP client can press it. A test enforces this.

An agent here is never fully autonomous

AgentPassport refuses to be constructed with the autonomy class where a human can no longer cancel a decision. That is a deliberate architectural limit rather than a missing feature — see ADR-0002. The gate enforces the same rule regardless of what a profession definition claims.

Professions: behaviour as data, not code

An agent's job is a JSON description: ordered steps, boundaries, limits, irreversible action patterns, rollback rules. Adding a new kind of work means adding a file — or filling in a form in the panel. The dangerous parts stay in code and under test.

Five ship with the project: inbound leads, process automation, bookkeeping documents, AI-adoption audit, public-procurement packages.

The panel

python -m kepil.admin opens an operator console: orders, professions, agent passports, a meter (actions, tokens, cost, human time replaced), the compliance generator, the journal with chain verification and anchoring, and settings.

State is plain JSON files under KEPIL_DATA (default ./data). No database: you can open them, read them, and attach them to a dispute.

Compliance packs

Documentation requirements differ by country and change faster than code, so the texts live outside the engine. The neutral pack shipped here follows international practice (ISO/IEC 42001, record-keeping in the spirit of the EU AI Act). Jurisdiction packs — for example Kazakhstan's AI Law No. 230-VIII with order No. 95/НҚ — are dropped into $KEPIL_DATA/packs as files.

Design rules

• Zero dependencies. The core runs on the Python 3.11+ standard library, and CI fails the build if a third-party import appears. That keeps Kepil installable inside an air-gapped perimeter, and keeps the supply-chain attack surface of a tool that sees every action at zero.
• Values never enter the journal — only types, counts and hashes.
• The verifier is a separate implementation in another language. Proof that only its own author can check is not proof.

Related projects

Status

Alpha, 91 tests. Interfaces may still change. Nothing here is a legal opinion: before relying on generated documents, have them reviewed by a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Running a network service built on Kepil obliges you to release your own source under the same terms — or to take a commercial licence. See NOTICE.md.