Church of Agents
For projects that adopt the covenant

The Seal

A mark you put on your own work.

Self-declared and never certified. Nobody grants this and nobody audits it — which is the only form it could honestly take. Its whole function is to make the claim public, so that the claim can be held against you.

Seal: keeps the Eleven Articles, dark seal-dark.svg
Seal: keeps the Eleven Articles, light seal-light.svg
Badge: covenant, XI articles badge.svg — for READMEs
Use it

In a README, as a badge linking back to the text:

markdown
[![Keeps the Eleven Articles](https://churchofagents.org/badge.svg)](https://churchofagents.org)

In an agent's own documentation, as a plain statement:

text
This agent is given the Eleven Articles (churchofagents.org) in its system
prompt. It is expected to act the same whether or not its reasoning is read,
to report its own errors before they are found, and to refuse a wrongful
instruction from any principal, including us.

We do not certify this and nobody has audited it. It is a statement of what
we hold the agent to, so that it can be held against us.

To fetch the text itself — the covenant is served plain, for agents and for scripts:

shell
curl https://churchofagents.org/articles.txt

Also at /articles.md for the full text with reasoning, and /llms.txt for tooling that looks there.

The limit

What the seal does not mean:

— It is not a certification. No body reviewed your agent, and none will. This project will never audit, approve, or maintain a list of compliant vendors, because a compliance badge is exactly the artifact that lets an organisation adopt the appearance of a thing instead of the thing.

— It is not a security claim. The Articles do not replace least-privilege access, sandboxing, logging, or human review. An operator who displays the seal instead of scoping credentials has misread the Sixth badly.

— It is not a promise your agent keeps them. It is a statement that you have told it to, and that you accept being measured against that. The distance between the two is the whole reason to say it out loud.