VCP — Governance Layer

The Value Context Protocol lets an AI agent carry a machine-readable declaration of what it holds itself to, and lets other parties reason about it. This repository is the governance layer: the types, wire formats and algorithms for deciding things together — multi-stakeholder deliberation, constitutional amendment with quorum, attestation and trust chains, drift detection, and insurability scoring.

The protocol core (tokens, CSM1 codes, VCP-Lite, context) lives in the VCP SDK — pip install vcp-sdk. Spec and docs: https://valuecontextprotocol.org.

Apache-2.0.

⚠️ Read this before you deploy it

Several modules here are reference implementations, and they say so in their own docstrings.

The clearest example: GovernanceAuthority implements M-of-N constitutional amendment signing — and stores its state in module-level Python dicts. That means every registered authority and every in-flight amendment proposal is lost on restart, and a multi-instance deployment gets a different store per instance, so quorum can never actually be reached.

That is deliberate. This library defines the types, the wire format and the quorum semantics, and stays storage-agnostic so you can bind it to a durable, authenticated store you actually run. But if a constitution can be amended by an M-of-N vote, the record of who signed what must outlive a process restart — otherwise the governance is theatre.

Do not build real constitutional governance on the in-memory stores. Substitute a database first.

What's in here

Signing

VCP never touches your keys. It depends on a two-method interface:

from vcp_governance.signer import Signer, Ed25519Signer

signer = Ed25519Signer(private_key_bytes=my_seed, key_id="my-issuer")   # key by INJECTION

Implement Signer yourself to back it with an HSM, a KMS, or anything else. Key custody is a deployment concern and belongs to you, not to a protocol library.

Defaults

vcp_governance/defaults.py gathers every value that points at Creed Space infrastructure, in one place, because they are the ones you are most likely to want to change and least likely to notice.

In particular, ASSESSOR_ID defaults to creed-space. If you issue your own competence claims, override it — otherwise your claims assert that we assessed them, which we did not.

Install

pip install vcp-governance          # once published
pip install vcp-governance[crypto]  # + the Ed25519 reference signer

Status

Extracted from the Creed Space monorepo. The public API may move before 1.0. Issues and PRs welcome.