Use, adapt,
and contribute
Use this constitution as a reference, adopt it through your AI-native company’s governance process, or adapt the text to your context. Developed at Selftail, it is shared to support application, critical evaluation and learning across organizations.
Choose what you intend to take from the work
As a design reference, the articles provide questions to ask of an agent system: who authorizes its actions, how outcomes are verified, what happens when evidence changes, and who remains responsible when a worker stops. These questions are relevant to teams introducing agents as well as companies designed around them.
As an adopted foundation, the constitution requires an exact version, a declared scope and accountable governance. An adopting company can specialize or strengthen its commitments through a charter, but cannot waive its adopted commitments while continuing to claim conformance with them.
As the basis for an independent adaptation, the text can be modified under CC BY 4.0 and governed by the adapter’s own arrangements. An adaptation is a distinct document; its derivation from Selftail does not establish endorsement or conformance with the original.
Make the organizational choices explicit
A constitutional text cannot assign real identities, spending limits or recovery procedures on its own. An organization applying this approach needs to connect each principle to the authority, controls and evidence that make it effective.
| Area | What to specify | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose and scope | Name the organization, intended beneficiaries, affected parties and activities covered. Distinguish the operating company from its technology providers. | Readers can identify whose interests and responsibilities the document governs. |
| Stewardship | Identify the humans who hold reserved powers, the matters each controls, and succession and recovery arrangements. | Changing an organization’s name in the text does not establish legitimate authority. |
| Delegated operation | Define mandates, permissions, aggregate limits and which consequential actions may proceed under standing grants. | Agents can complete ordinary work while remaining within verifiable boundaries. |
| Acceptance and remedy | Assign protected verification, rejection capability, incident ownership and a route for affected people to seek review. | The executor cannot be the sole authority over acceptance or complaints about its own work. |
| Evidence and change | Record the text and deployment versions, control coverage, evaluations, unresolved gaps and conditions that trigger reassessment. | Adoption and operating conformance remain distinct and inspectable claims. |
Each AI-native company defines its own scope, stewardship and amendment process. Adapting this publication does not amend commitments an organization has already adopted; those changes follow its own governance arrangements.
Open for reuse,
with attribution
The constitution and its original explanatory content are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Individuals and organizations may share, translate and adapt this material, including for commercial purposes, subject to the license terms.
Content covered by the license
The grant covers the original constitutional text, explanatory prose, worked examples and explanatory diagrams, including their content in HTML, Markdown and JSON editions. It is intended to support application, discussion and improvement beyond Selftail.
Selftail branding, third-party material and fonts, website and engine software, executable code and validation schemas are excluded from this content grant. Third-party material retains its own terms; software licensing is a separate decision.
How to share and adapt it
Credit the source, retain applicable notices, include the license link and identify your changes. Attribution must not imply endorsement, and you may not impose additional restrictions on the licensed rights.
CC BY 4.0 was chosen to support broad reuse while preserving the connection to the original work. The full legal terms ↗ govern the grant, including the warranty disclaimer. Existing copyright exceptions and public-domain rights remain unaffected.
Attribution identifies origin; evidence supports conformance
The license allows an organization to adapt the content without seeking Selftail’s approval for each modification. It concerns reuse of the publication; it does not authorize the organization’s agents, adopt the constitution for a deployment or demonstrate that the resulting system follows its provisions.
For clarity, an adaptation should carry a distinct document identity so readers can distinguish the original publication from the adapter’s commitments. This is an editorial recommendation rather than an additional license condition.
Adapted from the A Constitution for AI-Native Companies, 27 October 2026 — Sébastien Tandel / Selftail, under CC BY 4.0. Changes: [describe modifications]. This adaptation is not endorsed by Selftail.
A content license does not establish constitutional ratification, certification or operational conformance. Those remain separate claims requiring their own authority and evidence.
Help improve
the foundation
Use and adapt this work, challenge its assumptions, and share what you learn. Experience reports, failures, evaluation results, proposed revisions and translations can help make the principles more useful to everyone.
Tell us the context, relevant provision, what you observed, the supporting evidence and your suggested improvement. Include limitations and unnecessary friction as well as successes, and protect confidential information.
Contributing a proposal does not automatically amend any AI-native company’s adopted commitments. Each organization determines its own adoption and governance arrangements.
Share feedback or findings ↗