Cognate

Structural governance for autonomous intelligence.

Cognate is the AI governance layer built on Attestia. Attestia proves that something happened — an event, a transaction, a state transition — and binds that proof to a chain. Cognate uses those same attestation primitives to govern AI systems: what a model was permitted to do, what it actually did, and who authorized it.

Cognate attests to AI truth: model lineage, policy decisions, agent capabilities, and prompt and output integrity. Same Merkle proofs. Same append-only event store. Different domain.

Attestia, Cognate, and RepoMesh are three products. Attestia ships the financial domain (personal vault, org treasury, registrum) on top of those primitives. RepoMesh is the release network: signed events, node manifests, and an XRPL-anchored trust clock, on its own RFC 6962 ledger. It does not use Attestia’s Merkle tree. Cognate calls Attestia when it needs a proof, and RepoMesh when it needs a release checked.

The npm package @mcptoolshop/cognate is those libraries in one bundle. They are pure functions. You pass in the clock, the tenant key, and the store. @cognate/node is a separate HTTP layer over the same functions. Its /health returns "mode": "api". @cognate/repomesh-bridge checks a release on the RepoMesh ledger.

In this handbook

• Getting started — install the workspace and run pnpm verify.
• Usage — evaluate a policy, register a model version, approve a grant, log a prompt.
• Architecture — how the five packages sit on Attestia.
• Reference — the functions each package exports.
• Security — the threat model and what the libraries refuse to do.

What holds

A policy disagreement stops the call. A model version does not deploy itself. A capability grant is not active until a person approves it. A prompt record is append-only, encrypted with a key you hold, and hashed so a later edit is visible.

Those are library rules. A service you build on top of them can break them if it skips the calls. The handbook is about the calls.