Guardian Protocol: Governance for Autonomous AI Agents

We've been working on what we call the Guardian Protocol Framework for about a year now, and with NIST circling AI agent identity and authorization, it felt like the right moment to put the ideas somewhere public. The short version: most AI oversight models force a false choice. You either treat the agent as a subordinate tool (real autonomy is gone), treat it as a peer (you get infinite validation loops with no exit), or let it operate in isolation (decisions become unverifiable). None of those work once agents become genuinely capable. What we built instead is a governance model based on relational autonomy: agent and guardian as asymmetric partners, where the boundary between independence and oversight is explicit, auditable, and adjustable over time. How the decision structure actually works The core piece is what we call a Structured Decision Form, which carves out four distinct spheres. The first is agent autonomy. There are things the agent can do without guardian sign-off, thin