Open standards·Nonprofit governance·Trustworthy AI
We plant standards. They grow into trust.
TrustLayer Foundation is a nonprofit that stewards open standards for responsible technology. We believe that when trust is controlled by an entity it becomes untrustable — so we build accountability infrastructure that belongs to everyone. Our first standard is ARIA: The Agent Registry for Identity and Authorization.
Accountability is not a feature.It is the foundation.
Our mission is to promote the conscious, responsible and ethical use of technology — so that it serves people and the common good. We research, develop, and steward open standards that advance digital wellbeing, transparency, and technological sovereignty. We strive to ensure that artificial intelligence and emerging technologies become beneficial to society; not against it.
This is not a business strategy. It is a fundamental commitment, inscribed in our by-laws.
Agent Registry for Identity & Authorization
The first branch is ARIA.
ARIA is an open protocol that gives every AI agent a verifiable, cryptographically signed identity, anchored in the Domain Name System. Think of it as a passport for an AI Agent. What DNS is to domain names, ARIA is to AI agent identity.
Layered Trust Architecture
Today, AI agents cross organizational boundaries, access sensitive data, represent legal entities, and make financial decisions — with no standardized way to confirm who they are, who authorized them, what they intend to do, or whether their credentials are still valid. ARIA solves this with a layered architecture: identity anchored in DNS, verifiable credentials that travel with the agent, a signed declaration of intent on every interaction, and the Agent Trust Protocol — a three-phase handshake that protects both sides of every exchange. Accountability flows in both directions: Both the agent presenting itself and the system receiving it.
Post-Quantum Native
ARIA is post-quantum native. Not retrofitted — born that way. ML-DSA-65 + Ed25519 composite signatures, because we believe the time to prepare for post-quantum cryptography is now, not after the first breach.
Built to Complement
ARIA was designed to complement the current ecosystem, not compete against it. It works alongside Google A2A, Anthropic MCP, Microsoft Entra, AWS AgentCore, SPIFFE, and the emerging IETF frameworks — providing the cross-organizational identity layer that none of them supply on their own. ARIA becomes the layer that sits above any single cloud trust domain. The layer everyone needs. The layer that no single entity controls.
The tree grows.The fruit belongs to everyone.
ARIA is our first standard. It won't be our last. TrustLayer Foundation is developing open trust infrastructure for the world we're building together — standards for identity, for commerce, for accountability, and for the responsible relationship between humans and the technologies we create.
Each standard we steward is a branch. Each community that adopts it is a root. The tree grows because the foundation holds it open.
Built to endure.
If trust can be owned, it isn't trust.
Same model as Torvalds and the Linux Foundation. Mullenweg and WordPress. Baker and Mozilla. TrustLayer Foundation holds the standard. TrustLayer Foundation safeguards the standard. TUNO Labs operates the registry. Siblings — not parent-subsidiary. The standard is open. The governance is nonprofit. The implementation is commercial. Built this way on purpose.
Six conflict-of-interest mechanisms. Independent oversight. Annual written disclosures. Every specification change requires public review, community discussion, and qualified-majority approval. All deliberations are public. Because trust infrastructure demands trust in its own governance.
The world needs trust it can verify.
We don't know everything the future holds. But we know this: whatever comes next will need trust. And trust — real trust — can't be owned. It can only be built. Open. Together.
If you build with AI, if you set standards, if you care about what technology does to people and what people can do with technology — there is a place for you here.
Punto 2012 · TUNO Labs