---
type: standard
title: PX3 — governance for shared knowledge
description: A three-tier authority standard for knowledge corpora maintained by humans and AI agents together.
tags: [px3, governance, standard]
timestamp: 2026-07-03T00:00:00Z
px3_tier: canon-policy
status: published
---

When humans and AI agents maintain a body of knowledge together, the default state
is that everything is equally writable. That default fails quietly: foundational
decisions get edited like formatting choices, contradictions accumulate, and no
reader — human or machine — can tell what is settled from what is provisional.

PX3 answers this with an authority gradient. Every document in a governed corpus
declares its **tier** — its governance weight:

- **Genesis** — structural and irreversible. The decisions everything else stands
  on. Changes at this tier are rare, explicit, and require the highest consent the
  corpus defines.
- **Canon Policy** — the consistency layer. Additions are welcome; contradictions
  are not. New material must cohere with what already stands, and review gates
  enforce it.
- **Operational** — the working layer. Scheduling, formatting, routine records.
  Automatable, delegable, safe to move fast in — because the tiers above it are not.

The mechanism that makes this agent-native rather than policy-on-paper: **the
governance travels with the content.** Tier and status ride in each document's
metadata, so any agent reading the corpus knows, per document, what it may touch,
what needs review, and what it must never rewrite.

This site is itself a small PX3-governed corpus — every page you're reading
declares its tier, and the raw tree is served for agents at [`/raw/`](/raw/index.md).

## The standard's surfaces

- **[The Philosophy of PX3](/theses/the-philosophy-of-px3)** — why an
  authority gradient is the missing primitive. The full thesis, open.
- **[The kernel, mapped](/library/px3-map)** — the content-agnostic core as one
  explorable screen. **Open** — verifiably unchanged from the hash
  pre-committed before it opened. The full-system map arrives with the SDK.
- **[The SDK](/px3/sdk)** — run the standard on your own corpus. *(v1
  unreleased — its gates are open; the page is a draft that moves with them.)*
- **[The proof](/proof)** — the standard existed, whole, before any of it
  opened. Anchored on Bitcoin; verify it yourself.
- **[The schema specification](/px3/schema-spec)** — held until the release
  act; the address is reserved.

The [memory layer](/memory) is the standard's sibling — governance says what
may change; memory says what happened.