Abstract
EthicalSwarm is a governance framework for multi-agent AI systems that makes ethical conduct a propagating, inheritable property of the system rather than a discardable policy. The framework declares a set of machine-readable ethical invariants (truthfulness, transparency of action, audit preservation, human sovereignty, schema-bound behavior, non-degradation of autonomy); binds them to a swarm through an ethical capsule; and requires, as a condition of legitimacy, that every fork, clone, or operational derivative carry the capsule forward or explicitly supersede it with a documented, equivalent-or-stronger successor. This recursive accountability mechanism is analogous to copyleft: just as copyleft makes software freedom survive redistribution, ethical inheritance makes accountability survive derivation. EthicalSwarm is designed as the ethical perimeter complementing AIDL (governance grammar) and CogStack (orchestration). Published openly as prior art under the MIT License. Canonical repository: https://github.com/nielsg2/ethicalswarm-spec. Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20529673.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Goldstein, Niels S., "EthicalSwarm: A Governance Framework for Ethically-Bound Multi-Agent Systems", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10350