Govern the knowledge assistant, not just the answer.

The assistant answers. The protocol governs the answer as an act.

KYE Protocol™ binds the assistant to a purpose, checks admissibility, and proves the cited basis.

The kind of assistant this governs is a document-QA or retrieval-augmented system: a clinician asks about dosing, an analyst asks about a filing, and the assistant pulls passages from an approved corpus and replies with citations. Products in this category sit close to high-stakes decisions, so the question is not only "is the answer good?" but "was the assistant allowed to answer, and can the basis be replayed?"

KYE Protocol™ answers the second question. It binds the assistant to a purpose and scope, decides admissibility at the boundary, pins each retrieval call, packs the cited sources as evidence, and seals a replay-proof. The result is an act a regulator can re-derive, not a log they must trust.

Six existing schemas, assembled into one chain.

Each envelope validates against the protocol schema it reuses. No new schema was minted.

• Governance binding — the assistant declares purpose, read-only scope, and its single retriever.
• Admissibility decision — twelve per-check verdicts answer whether retrieval is allowed.
• Tool-call pin — the retrieval call, fixed by version and input and output hashes.
• Evidence pack — cited guideline and formulary passages as signed signals.
• Replay-proof — the decision re-runs to a byte-equal result.
• Completion ledger — the actual file reads and tool call, checked against the declared scope.

Provable from public keys alone.

Every signed envelope in the chain verifies against the published key set at trust/self-audit-jwks.json — the same Ed25519 verification surface the protocol uses to audit itself. No credentials, no vendor portal: parse the JSON, canonicalise the payload, and check the signature. The self-audit page walks the verifier step by step.

Wrap your RAG answer in a dozen lines.

Keep your retriever and your model. Add KYE Protocol™ at the answer boundary.

Ask decide() whether the answer may proceed and under whose authority, then seal the cited basis as an Evidence Pack™ — verifiable from public keys alone. The free tier runs client-side. The canonical snippets are kye:snippet:govern-rag-ts and kye:snippet:govern-rag-py.

// TypeScript — npm install @kye/sdk
import { KyeClient } from "@kye/sdk";

const kye = new KyeClient({ apiKey: process.env.KYE_API_KEY });

// Your RAG pipeline stays as-is; KYE governs the answer as an act.
export async function answer(question: string, principal: string) {
  const sources = await retrieve(question);
  const decision = await kye.decide({
    purpose: "knowledge.assistant.answer",
    principal,
    inputs: { question, source_ids: sources.map((s) => s.id) },
  });
  if (decision.effect !== "permit") return decision.refusal;

  const draft = await generate(question, sources);
  await kye.evidence.pack(decision.context_seal, { answer: draft, sources });
  return draft;
}

Python parity ships as kye:snippet:govern-rag-py via pip install kye-sdk. KYE Protocol™ never sees your corpus or your model output beyond the source_ids you pass it — it governs whether the answer may proceed, not whether it is true (§63 / §31).