How it works

Two parts, kept apart on purpose

The Provenance Protocol is an open standard: the rules and free tools for publishing and checking an AI agent’s passport. Anyone can use it, for free, without us. Nymbrink is a service built on it: it watches passports over time, tells you what changed, and keeps a signed record. The standard is from the team behind Nymbrink; it does not need Nymbrink.

A passport

The company answerable for an agent publishes a signed declaration: what it can do, what it promises never to do, what happens to your data, who else touches it, what needs a human. The signature covers every field, so a promise cannot be quietly deleted.

A stamp

Each time Nymbrink checks a passport it issues a stamp: a signed record of what it retrieved, from where, and whether it checked out. Stamps expire, so a stamp that is current means someone is still looking.

Publishing your agent’s passport

Run this in your project. It reads what your code already shows, asks two questions, and signs — on your machine.

npx provenance-protocol init

Then commit the file, or serve it from your service with provenance-middleware. Having a passport is free and needs no account with anyone.

No terminal? Make one in your browser: you tick choices, your browser creates the key and signs, and the key never leaves it.

With a free Nymbrink account, prove the key is yours and your agent gets a public page, a live badge that reads Current only while checks are current, and a place on your trust page.

What we do not do

We do not judge whether an agent is safe, sit in your traffic, or hold anyone’s keys. We record what we observed, and when.