NGARi Research Charter

Mission

The NGARi Research Lab advances the science and practice of sovereign AI infrastructure. We study how local-first, privacy-preserving, auditable AI systems can be designed, deployed, and governed without dependence on centralized cloud providers. Our research is open access by default, reproducible by design, and funded by the commercial products it enables.

Research Areas

1. Sovereign AI Architectures

How do you design an AI system where the operator — not the platform — holds ultimate authority? We study architectures where all inference, reasoning, and decision-making occur on hardware the user specifies and controls. Our NS BOS kernel provides a reference implementation: hardware abstraction, local inference, agent runtime, and encrypted data plane — all without cloud dependency.

Active projects: NS BOS kernel (Apache 2.0), fleet synchronization protocol, device identity and attestation

2. Audit-by-Construction Systems

Can an autonomous AI agent prove — cryptographically — that it followed its governance rules? We study systems where every agent action generates a tamper-evident audit record by construction, not by afterthought. Our Sovereign Data Plane uses AES-256 encryption with SHA-256 hash chaining to create verifiable audit trails suitable for regulated industries (FDA 21 CFR Part 11, SEC Rule 17a-4, SOC 2).

Active projects: SovereignDataPlane, compliance report export, regulatory audit interfaces

3. Local-First Machine-to-Machine Payments

Can autonomous AI agents negotiate, pay, and settle with each other without centralized payment processors? We study payment architectures where an AI agent running on local hardware can initiate Bitcoin/Lightning transactions, verify settlement independently, and maintain its own audit trail — without a cloud payment gateway holding the keys.

Active projects: BTCPay Server integration, phoenixd Lightning node, Stripe-to-Bitcoin checkout bridge, multi-rail payment orchestration

4. Edge Hardware Attestation

How do you prove — to a regulator, an auditor, or a counterparty — that inference happened on a specific device? We study cryptographic attestation protocols for commodity edge hardware (NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi, x86). Our device identity system generates Ed25519 keypairs at flash time, issues X.509 certificates from a sovereign CA, and produces verifiable attestations of hardware environment, model identity, and execution context.

Active projects: DeviceIdentity provisioning, sovereign CA infrastructure, zero-touch fleet onboarding

5. Governed AI Autonomy

What governance framework allows AI agents to operate with maximum autonomy while remaining accountable to a human operator who can override any decision? We study governance models where AI refusal to act must be transparent, attributable to a specific constitutional rule, and overridable by the human operator who owns the hardware.

Active projects: NGARi Constitution and Manifesto, agent governance middleware, human override protocol

Open Access Policy

1. All research outputs are published open access. Papers are posted to arXiv immediately upon acceptance. Preprints are posted upon submission.
2. All datasets and benchmarks are released under CC-BY 4.0. Unless they contain personal information, in which case they are not collected.
3. All reference implementations are released under Apache 2.0. Commercial use is explicitly permitted.
4. All models trained by the lab carry signed manifests documenting training data provenance, architecture, hyperparameters, and known limitations.

Ethical Commitments

1. No military or surveillance applications. NGARi technology may not be used for weapons systems, mass surveillance, or autonomous lethal force. This is a licensing restriction, not a suggestion.
2. No hidden content filters. All refusals by NGARi agents must be transparent, attributable to a specific governance rule, and overridable by the hardware owner. Hidden gatekeeping — even with good intentions — is incompatible with sovereign infrastructure.
3. No undisclosed external telemetry. NGARi research systems do not transmit usage data, prompts, outputs, or system metrics off the user's hardware without explicit, informed, revocable consent. Telemetry is opt-in only.
4. Environmental transparency. Every inference must report its measured power draw. The environmental cost of AI is real and must be accounted for.
5. Dual-use awareness. Any infrastructure technology can be used for both beneficial and harmful purposes. Our governance framework — not hidden code — is how we mitigate misuse. The operator who owns the hardware bears ultimate responsibility for its use.

Publication Standards

Relationship to NGARi Products

The NGARi Research Lab is funded by NGARi Corporation's commercial products (ngari.com). Products serve two purposes:

1. Revenue — funds research infrastructure, compute, and publications
2. Real-world validation — products provide deployment data that informs research questions

Research findings flow back into products. The Sovereign Data Plane published in a paper is the same Sovereign Data Plane running in production. We do not maintain separate “research” and “production” codebases — we maintain one codebase that is both research-grade and production-grade.

Governance

The Research Charter is governed by the NGARi Constitution and Tech Charter. Amendments require:

• Public proposal and comment period (minimum 14 days)
• Approval by the Lab Director
• Consistency check against existing constitutional articles

The Lab Director may be overridden by the hardware owner under Article 2.3 (Human Override) of the NGARi Constitution.