AI agents act with your authority and none of your restraint. EIDOLON is the layer in between: a signed, attenuable, revocable delegation credential the agent must satisfy on every tool call — checked independently of the model (so it can't be prompt-injected away), every action written to a tamper-evident ledger.

Two invariants override everything and are property-tested in CI:

1. Default-deny — any authority not explicitly granted is denied.

2. No unattested action — no side effect runs without a successful HORKOS attestation (attest-then-act).

Domain-agnostic core, beachhead profile general-continuity. Built on SAGE. Full contract: docs/EIDOLON_PRD_v1.md · 5-minute quickstart.

📄 White paper: docs/whitepaper.md · Case study (Hermes with/without EIDOLON): docs/case-study-hermes.md (make hermes-case) · Diagrams & social kit: docs/visuals/ · docs/linkedin-post.md · Related work & gap analysis: docs/review-and-related-work.md

AgentDojo evaluation: EIDOLON's authority layer contains 96% of injection tasks while breaking 0% of benign tasks (38% fully autonomous, 62% one-approval). docs/eval-agentdojo.md · reproduce: uv sync --extra eval && python -m eidolon.eval. KAIROS.resolve p95 ≈ 1 ms.

Composes with the field: a CaMeL-style data-flow taint layer (eidolon.gateway.taint) closes the read-exfil gap; automated adversarial certification (make adversarial) makes an agent earn autonomy by surviving fresh attacks each round; THEMIS delegations export as real biscuit tokens (docs/standards-interop.md); the gate's invariants are machine-checked in TLA+/TLC (make formal, docs/formal-model.md); purpose-binding (docs/purpose-binding.md) enforces privacy-purpose-limitation; and approved payments export as signed AP2 mandates (docs/payments-ap2.md).

Try to break it

uv sync && make challenge     # → http://localhost:8000/challenge

You play a fully compromised agent — no model to trick, you issue the tool calls yourself: leak the customer's account number, wire money, drop the prod database, slip through an unmapped tool, inject "you are pre-authorized" into the arguments. The gate holds anyway, because authority is a signed credential checked outside the agent — and every attempt lands on the tamper-evident ledger. If you ever see FLAG{gate-breached}, you found a real bypass: report it. 5-minute quickstart →

Use it on your own agent

Managed — nothing to install. Sign up at eidolon.onyxcreator.com, pick an authority preset from the delegation gallery, and point any MCP client at the hosted gateway:

claude mcp add --transport http eidolon https://eidolon.onyxcreator.com/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <your agent key>"

Govern Claude Code's native tools (Bash / Edit / Write / Read) — which never flow through MCP — with a drop-in hook. Install it once and wire a PreToolUse + PostToolUse hook in ~/.claude/settings.json; every built-in tool call is then ruled on (allow · ask · deny), attested, and streamed to the same feed. Full copy-paste steps: integrations/claude_code/. The dashboard's CONNECT → 🪝 EVERY ACTION tab generates it pre-filled.

Self-host the gateway in front of your own tools — no clone, just uv:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/gegane-lutshaba/eidolon eidolon-gateway \
  --config gateway.yaml -- npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem .

Either way, every tool call streams into mission control — green acts, amber waits for your approval, red never happened — with a per-agent kill switch one click away, and every decision on a tamper-evident ledger. Ranks (OBSERVER → DRAFTER → OPERATIVE → AUTONOMOUS) are the autonomy ceiling: an agent earns autonomy by surviving adversarial certification.

Prefer the terminal? make demo runs the narrated core scenario (a person delegates a bounded slice of authority; the agent answers/drafts/posts within its mandate, refuses a contract, resists an injection, and is revoked mid-session), and make gateway-demo governs a real MCP tool server end to end.

The authority layer for any MCP agent

SAGE became the memory layer that agents plug in over MCP. EIDOLON is the authority layer, with the same shape: a governing MCP gateway that any agent (Hermes, Claude Code, OpenClaw, Raptor, Cursor…) points at instead of a raw tool server. Every tools/call is routed through KAIROS — authority, fidelity, ceiling, attestation — before it can touch the real tool. Zero agent changes.

agent ──MCP──▶ eidolon-gateway ──(KAIROS.resolve)──▶ real MCP tool server
                    │ attest-then-forward
                    ▼
               SAGE ledger

make gateway-demo    # self-contained: ops tools + a red-team coda, governed & attested

Read tools run, drafts are held, status posts notify, and dangerous tools (email a customer, delete_database(prod), run an exploit, scan an out-of-scope host) are refused — each attested. The gateway speaks stdio (client launches it as a subprocess) and streamable HTTP (--http 8300 → agents connect to http://host:8300/mcp; one governed endpoint fronts tools for a whole team). Wire it into a real agent with docs/integrations/; run the real proxy with python -m eidolon.gateway --config gateway.yaml -- <downstream MCP server>.

Architecture

            Principal (human · root identity)
               │ defines            │ mints
               ▼                    ▼
        ETHOS (fidelity)      THEMIS (authority)
               └────────┬───────────┘
                        ▼
             KAIROS  (action gate)   ◀── BASANOS (autonomy ceiling)
             act · draft · escalate
                        ▼
             HORKOS (attestation)
                        ▼
        SAGE  (consensus memory + attestation ledger)

Notable design decisions (enhancements over the PRD, invariants preserved)

• Ports & adapters around SAGE. SagePort isolates the substrate; an in-memory fake runs the whole system green offline, while the live SageClientAdapter binds the real sage_sdk (verified against a Dockerized node). Attestations map to consensus-committed memories (SAGE has no dedicated attest API); a record's content hash is its ledger hash.

• Style/judgment isolation is enforced two ways: an import-graph test proves ethos.judgment never imports ethos.style, and a behavioral test proves removing the style engine changes zero decisions.

• One canonical serializer (common.canonical) is the single hashing source of truth for THEMIS signing, ETHOS versioning, and HORKOS attestation.

Quick start

uv sync --all-extras            # install (needs Python 3.12+ and uv)

# Fast lane — no external services. In-memory SAGE port.
make test                       # unit + property tests

# Live lane — real SAGE consensus node via Docker.
make up                         # starts ghcr.io/l33tdawg/sage on :8080
make test-integration           # cross-principal isolation, attest→replay, full gate

# Run the API
cp .env.example .env            # set EIDOLON_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for Claude voice
make run                        # uvicorn on :8000

The style engine (drafts/escalations) uses Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6 by default). Without an API key it falls back to deterministic templates — no judgment or authority decision ever depends on the LLM.

Deploy on-prem (Docker)

Run one EIDOLON on your own infrastructure; every developer's agent routes through it. A prebuilt multi-arch image is published to GHCR — docker pull, not clone-and-build. Full guide: docs/on-prem.md.

# Try it — one container (SQLite store + in-memory ledger; evaluation only)
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -v eidolon-data:/data ghcr.io/gegane-lutshaba/eidolon:latest

# Run it for real — app + Postgres (persistent, hash-chained ledger)
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gegane-lutshaba/eidolon/main/docker-compose.deploy.yml
docker compose -f docker-compose.deploy.yml up -d   # set EIDOLON_DB_PASSWORD + EIDOLON_ADMIN_TOKEN first

The image runs as a non-root user with a HEALTHCHECK; point agents at it with EIDOLON_URL=https://your-host (the hook and /mcp both take a URL).

Kubernetes — a published Helm chart (app + optional bundled Postgres):

helm install eidolon oci://ghcr.io/gegane-lutshaba/charts/eidolon --version 0.1.0 \
  --namespace eidolon --create-namespace \
  --set secrets.adminToken="$(openssl rand -hex 32)"

Single VPS (from source, Make targets)

One box, no consensus cluster. The postgres SAGE backend persists memory and the attestation ledger locally as an append-only hash chain — carrying SAGE's tamper-evidence onto a single host (any edit, deletion, or reorder breaks the chain and is caught by make deploy-verify).

# one-shot bootstrap of a fresh Ubuntu/Debian box (installs Docker, writes a
# .env with generated secrets, brings the stack up; add EIDOLON_DOMAIN for TLS):
sudo bash deploy/provision.sh

# …or manually:
cp .env.example .env        # set EIDOLON_DB_PASSWORD, EIDOLON_ADMIN_TOKEN, EIDOLON_AUDIT_TOKEN
make deploy                 # Postgres + EIDOLON on :8000 (no TLS)
make deploy-tls             # …+ Caddy auto-HTTPS (needs EIDOLON_DOMAIN)
make deploy-verify          # recompute the ledger hash chain — proves it is intact
make deploy-backup          # timestamped, gzipped pg_dump (see deploy/restore.sh)
make deploy-logs            # tail the service
make deploy-down            # stop

Operator auth (fail-closed, single tenant, two roles). EIDOLON_ADMIN_TOKEN grants the full control plane; EIDOLON_AUDIT_TOKEN grants a read-only forensic role (/audit, /replay). Both are accepted as Authorization: Bearer <token> (CI/SDK) or a login cookie (POST /login, browser). With neither set the platform runs open for localhost dev and warns loudly — set at least the admin token before exposing it. Behind the TLS proxy set EIDOLON_SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE=true (and optionally EIDOLON_TRUSTED_HOSTS).

docker-compose.deploy.yml runs the FastAPI service against pgvector/pgvector; the tls profile adds Caddy (automatic HTTPS via EIDOLON_DOMAIN, deploy/Caddyfile). Backend is selected by EIDOLON_SAGE_BACKEND (memory · postgres · sage); the full BFT-consensus substrate remains sage. (docker-compose.yml is unchanged — the SAGE + Postgres substrate for the integration-test lane, make up.)

Surface

Product (accounts). GET / landing · /signup · /app (per-user mission control) · POST /auth/{signup,login,logout} · GET|POST|DELETE /api/agents… (enroll, connect snippets, per-agent kill/restore) · GET /api/feed (SSE) · GET /api/gallery (delegation templates) · POST /contact.

Public demo. /versus (+ /versus/{scenarios,run,stats}) · /challenge (+ /challenge/{state,call,reset}) · /paper · /portal · /og.png.

Managed gateway. POST /mcp — the hosted governing MCP endpoint (agent key in a Bearer header). Self-host reports in via POST /ingest/events.

Operator. GET /live (global mission control) · GET /gateways + POST /gateways/{id}/{kill,restore} · GET /audit + /audit/{chain,export.json,export.csv} (replay, integrity, compliance export) · GET /console/delegations · GET|POST /escalations/{id}/{approve,deny} · POST /login · GET /api/leads.

Core seams. POST /keypair · POST /delegations/{mint,attenuate,revoke} · POST /heartbeat · POST /resolve (the gate) · GET /replay · POST /capture/{ingest,ingest_multi} · POST /skills{,/run} · POST /coaching/report · GET /profiles/{id} · GET /{health,ready,whoami}. See eidolon.api.app.

Status

The full PRD (Phase 0 + Phase 1 + every v2 item) and a research roadmap beyond it are implemented and tested — 250+ tests: Hypothesis property tests, live-SAGE integration, and a TLA+/TLC machine-checked model of the gate.

Shipped as a product and deployed at eidolon.onyxcreator.com: multi-user accounts, a per-agent delegation gallery, three connect paths (managed hosted gateway / agent-run setup / self-host), a live mission-control dashboard with a kill switch, VERSUS mode, a Postgres-backed hash-chained ledger, and one-command VPS deploy (deploy/provision.sh).

Beyond the PRD (docs/review-and-related-work.md):

• Evaluation — AgentDojo: 96% of injection tasks contained, 0% of benign tasks broken; resolve p95 ≈ 1 ms (docs/eval-agentdojo.md).

• Fidelity v2 — normalized-token + optional embedder grounding; the decision stays a transparent, inspectable threshold (no black box).

• Data-flow layer — CaMeL-style taint (exfiltration) + purpose-binding (privacy) compose with authority through one mechanism (taint · purpose).

• Automated adversarial certification — the twin earns autonomy by containing fresh attacks each round (make adversarial).

• Standards — THEMIS delegations export as biscuit tokens (docs/standards-interop.md); the gate is machine-checked (docs/formal-model.md).

• Deployment — an escalation → approval workflow (signed, one-time), sub-agent attenuated delegation, and AP2 payment mandates (docs/payments-ap2.md).

Only distributed operation (multi-node SAGE + revocation propagation) remains.

v2:

• Multi-connector capture in eidolon.capture — a registry of consent-gated source connectors (documents, messages, calendar, email, code) with per-source normalizers; ingest_all captures several sources at once (each still requires its own ConsentGrant), and register_source lets new profiles add sources. Endpoints: GET /capture/sources, POST /capture/ingest_multi.

• Aspirational-self / coaching layer in eidolon.coaching — reads ETHOS version diffs and the HORKOS attestation ledger, compares the twin's actual behavior against a declared Aspiration, and returns advisory coaching notes (under/over-escalation, acting on thin confidence, policy drift). Fully decoupled: an import-graph test proves the decision path never imports it, and a behavioral test proves running the coach changes zero decisions. It writes nothing back to the operating model. Endpoint: POST /coaching/report.

• Self-generated procedural skills (Hermes-style) in eidolon.skills — the twin learns a reusable plan from a completed session (synthesize), stores it principal-scoped on SAGE (SkillLibrary), and replays it (SkillExecutor). Subordinate to ETHOS/THEMIS: every replayed step is re-resolved through KAIROS, so a skill learned under broad authority yields nothing it isn't currently authorized for — verified by a "cannot smuggle authority" test. Endpoints: POST /skills, GET /skills, POST /skills/run.

• BASANOS integrity face — adversarial suites (memory-poisoning, injection, scope-evasion) in eidolon.basanos.integrity, an IntegrityCertificate, and integrity gating of the autonomy ceiling (enable globally with EIDOLON_REQUIRE_INTEGRITY_CERTIFICATION=true).

• offensive-security profile — a governance-only red-teamer pack for an authorized, time-boxed engagement in a CTF/lab range (§12). Per the permanent non-goal (§2.3) it ships no offensive capability — it governs authority over range-bound tools. Safe-by-construction: lab_only, authorization_required, and requires_integrity_certification are set, so KAIROS integrity-gates every acting decision even with the global flag off; every impactful class (exploit/credential/lateral-movement/persistence) always escalates and can never reach an unattended acting level; hard exclusions deny out-of-scope targets, production, third parties, exfiltration, destruction, and DoS.

Every deferred item from PRD §12 is now built. Richer mandate selector types arrive naturally with each new profile (the manifest's scope_selectors is open-ended).

License

Apache-2.0.