Behaviour policies · an open home, proposed

Agent Behaviour Policies, hosted by the Open Security Summit.

A format that the buyer, the vendor, the reviewer and the insurer all write in has to be one that none of them owns. On 20 October 2026 RiskMandate's founders proposed that the Agent Behaviour Policies become the first hosted project of the Open Security Summit, a UK community interest company, rather than an OWASP project or a new foundation. It is a proposal, for discussion and legal review.

The proposal, on the newsroom ↗open-security-summit.org ↗Where it stands

01 · Why it needs a home

A description of an agent should not belong to the company that sells it.

The Agent Behaviour Policy started in the work at RiskMandate, and RiskMandate sells services on it. That is a reasonable way to start something and a poor way to make it a shared language. On 8 October the founders proposed it to OWASP; it was not the right fit for an OWASP project, and the reason for finding it a home has not changed. The Open Security Summit has always been about developers and security people working together, from its summits to the mini-summits it has run since 2020, and since 2019 it has been a community interest company, Open Security Summit CIC, company 11935098, which Dinis Cruz directs.

02 · The proposal

A host, a programme, and the ABP as its first project.

The host

The CIC holds the contracts, the finances and the accountability, rather than incorporating a new foundation.

The programme

Common rules for every hosted project: how one is admitted, the governance templates, what happens when one moves on or closes.

The project

Agent Behaviour Policies develops the open method; its own steering group and maintainers run it.

Hosting is not independence

Hosting separates the project from RiskMandate as an organisation. It does not by itself make its governance independent, because the director of the CIC is also a founder of RiskMandate. So the proposed governance starts with:

A public project charter: what the project is, what it decides, and how the charter itself can change.
A steering group with a majority independent of RiskMandate and The Cyber Boardroom, with independence defined: employment, money, advisory roles.
Technical direction delegated through the charter: maintainers, releases and specifications decided by the project, not the sponsor.
Published rules for contributions and decisions, with conflicts recorded and recusals when they apply.
Sponsor rights that do not buy technical control: funding gives no veto.

Until those are in place, the project is not described as independently governed, here or anywhere.

03 · What is stewarded

Already open: nothing to make open again.

The vocabulary, the policies and the pages are published under CC BY 4.0 and the code under Apache 2.0, at abp.sgit.ai and on this site. Hosting needs a record of what is stewarded: each asset, its licence and version, its rights holder, where it came from, and whether it is copied, transferred, maintained in place or linked. No blanket copyright assignment is proposed.

In scope

The public method: the terminology, the specifications, schemas and templates, non-confidential examples, and reference tools explicitly given to the project.

Not in scope

RiskMandate's product code, any customer's policies or evidence, commercial contracts, and any certification scheme.

04 · RiskMandate's place

A founding contributor, and one implementer among others.

RiskMandate becomes a founding contributor, a sponsor, an implementer and a commercial service provider, and says so. It is run today by The Cyber Boardroom, with a separate RiskMandate company expected.

The project is usable without buying anything from RiskMandate.
Other vendors can implement the public specifications.
Competitors can contribute on the same rules.
Funding gives no veto.
Nothing in the project says RiskMandate is the only implementation.

05 · Where it stands, as at 3 November 2026

Four phases, proposed; the first has not been reported done.

This site marks each phase as it happens, with its date and its source.

Confirm the basis. Review the CIC's articles and community-interest statement, inventory the assets and licences, take advice on conflicts and on any agreements between the companies. proposed
Establish the programme. Approve it through the CIC, adopt the first charter, recruit independent steering-group members, agree how it is funded and run. proposed
Publish and operate. Shared project infrastructure; the scope, licences, governance and contribution rules in public; the first releases. proposed
Review. Check that contributors from outside RiskMandate can really influence decisions, and improve the hosting rules before a second project is admitted. proposed

What carries over from the OWASP proposal

The work of 8 October was written for OWASP and much of it applies here: the contribution inventory, 82 assets with their source, licence and proposed action, which is the stewardship record phase 1 asks for; the draft charter, to be rewritten for the CIC; and what other projects teach. Nothing was sent to OWASP: the email and the application stayed drafts, as the tracker records, and they will not be sent. The OWASP pages stay at their addresses as the record of that proposal.

06 · What this does not claim

A proposal, said as one.

It is not an adopted charter or an executed transfer.
The governance is not yet independent: the charter and the steering group come first.
The CIC's documents have not been reviewed yet; that is the first step.
It is not an OWASP project, and not a separate registered foundation.
Legal and accounting advice comes before any agreement between any of the companies.

When it is ready, the public description could read: “Agent Behaviour Policies is an open community project hosted by Open Security Summit CIC. Originated through work at RiskMandate, it develops publicly available, vendor-neutral methods and artefacts for describing agent reach, organisational mandate, the gap between them, and the barriers that constrain behaviour. RiskMandate is a founding contributor and a commercial implementer.”

From Agent Behaviour Policies move to the Open Security Summit, by Dinis Cruz on the SGit Newsroom, 20 October 2026, CC BY 4.0, which this page follows.