OPEN SPECIFICATION · V0.1 DRAFT

Who stands behind this action?

Money has receipts. Code has commits. AI actions have nothing — yet. ActionReceipt is a signed, verifiable, tamper-evident record that an AI agent acted under a scoped mandate granted by a named, accountable human.

One JSON object. One signature. One verification URL.

Every receipt names the accountable human, the authority they loaned, the limits that applied, and any human review that occurred — signed and hash-chained so history cannot be silently rewritten. It carries hashes of content, never the content.

MandateActionReview, if setReceiptProofSettlement
✓ ReceiptVALID
actionquote.issue
summaryQ-2026-0417 · EUR 4,200
principalJana Keller
mandatehal:mandate:01J8ZR5K7L
counterpartynordwind-logistik
issued2026-07-02 14:22:31Z
signatureJWS ES256 · chain intact
sha256 de2881ab2e4f3d78f7b80017a19f
prev   9f2c8a41d6e3b7c5f0a2d9e8b1c4

Design principles

Six commitments, held in every receipt.

01

A human is always named

Every receipt resolves to an accountable person or legal entity. Anonymous agents do not get receipts.

02

Privacy by hashing

Receipts prove that something happened and who authorized it — never what it said.

03

Mandate-scoped

Authority is loaned, never transferred: scoped, limited, revocable, and checked before the action.

04

Allowed once reviewed

Mandates can require a named expert's review. Unreviewed means unreleased — and the review lives inside the receipt.

05

Tamper-evident

Signed (JWS) and hash-chained with sequence numbers. Deleting one link is visible forever.

06

Issuer-neutral

Anyone may issue receipts. Trust derives from published keys and named principals, not a central authority.

Get started

v0.1 is experimental, published for public comment. Free to implement — no royalties, no permission required.

SPECIFICATION

ActionReceipt v0.1

The full specification: structure, signing, verification, review gate, status lifecycle.

SCHEMA

receipt.schema.json

JSON Schema (2020-12) for validating receipts.

EXAMPLES

quote-issue.json · reviewed-content.json

A scoped quote under a EUR 5,000 ceiling, and a medical guide released through an expert review gate.

DISCUSS

github.com/actionreceipt/spec

Issues, feedback and implementation reports. Implementation experience is the input we want most.