Claim Pins

Claim Pins (claimpins) aims to be an open standard for self-checking evidence objects.

Each bundle would pin an evidentiary or computational claim to the material supporting it and a check a machine can run — an attestation you re-execute rather than take on trust. Where the inputs are open, anyone — person or automated agent — could run it from the bundle alone, offline, and see whether the result still holds.

A check that passes would attest that the computation reproduces under the conditions its author declared in advance. Provenance would travel inside the bundle, every input and every step pinned by content hash rather than by name. Signing would be optional — a way to establish who produced a bundle.

Why now

Knowledge settles between people through language and standing — email, calls, review, reputation. It settles between machines through APIs and schemas, deterministically. Nothing has ever had to sit in between.

Agents now produce and consume claims faster than any human review layer can absorb, and the way people settle a claim — credibility tied to reputational risk — finds nothing here to attach to. Claim Pins envisions an object for that missing row — evidence one agent hands another, which the receiver settles by re-running it rather than by trusting where it came from.

LEGACY COMMUNICATION

  human    ──── email, calls, review ────    human
    │                                          │
  machine  ── protocols, APIs, schemas ──  machine


EMERGING COMMUNICATION

  human    ──── email, calls, review ────    human
    │                                          │
  agent    ───────────── ??? ────────────    agent
    │                                          │
  machine  ── protocols, APIs, schemas ──  machine

Openness

The intent is an open standard in the full sense: implementable by anyone, for commercial and non-commercial purposes alike, without permission, fees, or reserved rights.

The project itself is run strictly non-commercially. It takes no revenue, has no funding channel, and reserves no commercial position for its maintainer. The intent is for the entire project (standard, names, domains) to be transferred to a neutral steward organization without compensation.

Implementation

A first draft would aim to be lightweight — a thin composition of standards and open projects that already work, without reinventing the wheel. Components under consideration:

BagIt (RFC 8493) — a plain, long-lived container for the bundle and its manifest.
Zip — a familiar envelope, suffixed .claimpin.zip, carrying magic bytes.
in-toto — a signed statement binding a claim to the artifacts it concerns.
OCI descriptors — content-addressed references to every input and output, by hash rather than by name.
SWHID — durable identity for the exact source that ran.
RO-Crate — optional descriptive metadata, for archives and catalogues that expect it.
DSSE / Sigstore — optional signatures over statements and verification events.
Transparency logs — optional independent evidence of when a claim existed.

Source

github.com/claimpins — empty for now.

Collaborate

If you work on something adjacent — reproducibility, provenance, evidence packaging, verification for automated agents — or you would like to help shape this, get in touch: hello@claimpins.org