Open standards for AI that can apply force.
When AI gets a body, a hallucination is no longer a wrong answer — it is a physical action. AI Governors is the global community stewarding PAIG — an open, vendor-neutral standard for autonomous embodied AI: a Force Continuum, an "ISO 42001 for Robotics" (working title), and the API that makes them provable. One community steward per region. Every seat open.
Standardization of the governance of autonomous embodied AI — humanoids, general-purpose mobile manipulators, and any AI system that can move and apply force among people: how much force such a system may be authorized to apply, how much human control that force requires, the management system and technical controls that make the coupling real, and the vendor-neutral interface that makes it enforceable and provable after the fact.
- A graduated force-authorization scale (PAFC-0…5) coupled to human-control tiers (HC-0…3)
- A management system + six technical controls for embodied AI ("ISO 42001 for Robotics")
- A governance API: identity, attestation, force-level authorization, tamper-evident logs, accountability
- Mappings to ISO 10218:2025, ISO 13482, IEC 61508 / ISO 13849, the EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230, the EU AI Act, and ISO/IEC 42001
- Replacing or reissuing existing physical-safety standards — PAIG complements and extends them
- Certification or conformity marks — these are drafts for comment, not a certification scheme
- Weapons development — autonomous lethal force is prohibited by the standard itself (PAFC-5 / rule R4)
- Legal advice
The gap
Real, current standards cover parts of the problem — and stop exactly where autonomous humanoids begin.
ISO 10218:2025 · ISO 13482
Govern industrial, collaborative, and gentle service robots — force limits, safety-rated stops. They assume defined tasks, not open-world autonomy taking real-time commands.
EU Machinery Reg. 2023/1230 · EU AI Act
From 2027, add AI & self-evolving-behaviour review and human oversight. A conformity regime — not a graduated force-authorization scale.
What's missing
How much force a machine may apply and how much human control it requires — and a universal, provable way to answer, after an incident, what it was told, what it decided, and who was accountable.
Become the AI Governor of your region
A standard for machines that move among people only works if someone, somewhere near the deployment, keeps it honest, current, and moving. Not a company. A person. The AI Governor is that person for a region — the named steward and advocate of this open standard where they live and work.
One region, one Governor. It mirrors how international standards have always worked: ISO doesn't write from a single office — it convenes one national body per country, each bringing its own regulations, incidents, and reality to the table. AI Governors applies that pattern to Physical AI, at the granularity the problem demands: every US state, every Canadian province and territory, every EU member, every country worldwide. Read the full designation model →
Read this first. "AI Governor" is a community designation inside an open-standards project. It is not a government position, an elected or appointed office, an official title, or a public role of any kind, and it carries no legal, regulatory, or enforcement authority whatsoever. It cannot bind anyone, license anyone, or speak for any government. It is the standards-community pattern — one named steward per region — applied to autonomous embodied AI. We are explicit about this because the standard touches public safety and law enforcement, and a designation that sounded official would be a real harm. It is an earned volunteer role in an open community. Nothing more, and — for the people who take it seriously — nothing less.
A regional reviewer
You read the drafts before they harden and comment as someone who knows your region — its robotics deployments, its regulators, its incidents. The Force Continuum should not be written only by the people who happened to be in the room first. Your review is the mechanism that keeps it from being provincial.
A local convener
You put the draft in front of people where you are — a university seminar, a safety-engineering meetup, a regulator's working lunch, a robotics team's internal review. One session per cycle. The standard spreads at the speed of people who care about it locally; you are that speed for your region.
A named point of contact
You are the person a journalist, a city official, or a robotics company in your region can reach when they ask "who's thinking about this here?" You don't answer for the standard — you point them to the open process and represent your region inside it.
Earned, not claimed
The designation is granted, not self-assigned, and it is granted against a real — if light — commitment. This is deliberate. A title anyone can take by filling in a form means nothing to a regulator or a standards body, and this one is meant to mean something. Here is exactly what earns it and exactly what keeps it. (One cycle = one release cycle of the standard, roughly quarterly.)
1 · Review one draft per cycle
Substantive, on-the-record comments on the open RFC — not a thumbs-up. "This conflicts with our regional machinery rule," "PAFC-3 needs a carve-out for care robots," "the audit-log schema won't survive our data-protection regime." The kind of comment that changes a line.
2 · Run one local session per cycle
Any format that puts the draft in front of your region and brings something back: a meetup, a seminar, a team review, a call with a local regulator. A paragraph on what you ran and what you heard is the deliverable — that field report is often more valuable than the review.
3 · Represent your region
Be the channel for your region's context — its regulations, its deployments, its incidents — into the standard, and the channel for the standard back out. This is the part that can't be automated and can't be faked.
You apply — a GitHub Issue (AI Governor: <your region>) or one email to [email protected] — with your region, your background, and one line on why this matters where you are. The working group reviews the application against the commitment. Expertise helps; consistent presence counts more — a functional-safety engineer is welcome, but so is a committed local organizer who will actually run the sessions.
We will not overstate the current process. Until the working group is seated, the convening steward (Cognita GRC) confirms designations directly, and the site says so on the record. As the working group forms, confirmation moves to it. Every confirmation is announced in the Latest strip and credited in the repository — so the process is auditable from the outside at every stage.
The seat is a rolling commitment, not a lifetime title. Meet the commitment across a cycle and you keep it. Miss a cycle because life happened — tell us, and it holds. Go silent, and the seat reopens, publicly, on the wall. This is the honest part: the Wall of Governors only ever shows people currently doing the work. A wall of names who signed up once and vanished would be worth nothing, and would quietly discredit everyone still on it.
What you get — your name on the wall as your region's Governor. Credit by name in the documents you shape — the RFC that becomes a citable standard carries the people who wrote it. A standing invitation to every working session. And the specific standing of a founding Governor: the first cohort shaped the Force Continuum before it hardened, and the record shows it.
No payment, no equity, no employment, no exclusivity — it is a volunteer role in an open project. What it offers is authorship of something that doesn't exist anywhere else yet, and a seat at the table where it's decided.
How to become one
Open a GitHub Issue — AI Governor: <your region> — using the short template, or email [email protected]. Your region, your background, one line on why it matters where you are. Email carries exactly the same standing as an Issue.
The working group reviews your application against the three commitments. Expertise helps; consistent presence counts more. Until the working group is seated, the convening steward confirms designations and says so here — no pretense that a committee exists before it does.
You're listed on the wall as your region's Governor, credited by name in the documents you help shape, and invited to every session. Your first cycle starts at the next release.
The Wall of Governors
One seat per region — every US state, every Canadian province and territory, every EU member, every African country, every country worldwide.
An empty wall is not a weakness here — it is the most honest thing on this site. This standard is days old and belongs to no one yet. Every seat is a founding seat, and the record will always show who filled it first and whether they're still doing the work.
No region matches “” — check the spelling, or apply by email.
Every seat above is genuinely open — no fabricated names, no inflated counts, no honorary fills, no "coming soon" placeholders standing in for people. If the wall says open, it is open. If it shows a name, that person applied, was confirmed, and is doing the work; the moment they aren't, the seat says so. Designations are announced in the Latest strip and credited in the repository when confirmed. This wall is a record, not a marketing surface — and it is the first thing we'd point a skeptic to.
Structure — working areas
Proposed structure, to be ratified at Session 1. Four working areas on the technical-committee pattern; each maintains a living draft in the document register. Confirmed participants today: 0 — every convenor seat is open, and the first people in are founding members.
The Force Continuum (PAFC)
Embodied AI Governance ("ISO 42001 for Robotics")
Physical AI Governance API
Working Group & Governance
Document register
Deliverables under development. Every document is an open draft — versioned in the repository, free to read, comment on, and implement.
| Doc ID | Title | Working area | Stage | Version | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAIG-1 | Physical AI Force Continuum (PAFC) | WG-1 · Core | RFC — open for comment ↗ | v0.1 | · Comment on RFC #1 ↗ · Source ↗ |
| PAIG-2 | Embodied AI Governance Standard ("ISO 42001 for Robotics") | WG-2 · Standard | Working Draft | v0.1 | · Source ↗ |
| PAIG-3 | Physical AI Governance API | WG-3 · Interop | Working Draft | v0.1 | · Source ↗ |
| PAIG-0 | Working Group & Governance | WG-0 · Process | Forming | v0.1 | · Source ↗ |
A plain-language analogue of the ISO stage ladder (WD → CD/DIS → IS). "Forming" marks a process document awaiting ratification at the first session. Nothing here is a published ISO standard or a certification — these are community drafts designed to complement ISO 10218:2025, ISO 13482, the EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230, the EU AI Act, and ISO/IEC 42001.
Documents
The living drafts, in full. Comments and pull requests welcome via the repository.
Participation & membership
An open committee: participation is free and the process is public. Cognita GRC is the steward, not the owner — the standard text is CC BY 4.0 and the API specification is Apache-2.0. We're forming the working group now to take v0.1 to a citable standard.
Why join now: the first participants shape the Force Continuum before it hardens — convenor seats are open, and contributors are credited by name in the documents they shape.
Open a Join Issue (a two-field form) or send one email — role + one line on your background.
You're invited to the first working session: ratify scope, assign document leads, set cadence.
Comment on the PAIG-1 RFC — the levels, the coupling rule, the open questions — before v0.2 is cut.
Convening steward: Guillaume Kaldjob · Cognita GRC · [email protected] — email carries the same standing as a GitHub Issue. How decisions are made: Process & meetings.
Process & meetings
How the committee decides — rough consensus, evidence over opinion, public-safety first. The full process document is PAIG-0, to be ratified at the first session.
Material safety decisions require sign-off from ≥ 2 functional-safety and ≥ 1 regulatory participant. Substantive changes arrive as pull requests with a linked Issue + rationale.
- Ratify scope + principles.
- Force Continuum v0.1 (PAIG-1) — adopt/refine the PAFC levels + Force–Control Coupling as the first RFC.
- Assign leads per document.
- Decide the conformance/attestation model (self vs. third-party) and the minimal audit-log schema.
- Set cadence + the v0.2 milestone.
Drafts published; call for participants.
Force Continuum RFC ratified; minimal audit-log schema; reference OpenAPI spec.
Pilot with ≥1 robotics vendor; map to EU MR 2023/1230 + EU AI Act.
Citable standard + open reference implementation.