Why We Built It — and How It Works
By Andi Mazingo
The Trump administration has made its position clear: there will be no public regulatory agency for artificial intelligence. No equivalent of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. No Sarbanes-Oxley moment for the AI era — at least not from this government, and not now.
We didn't wait.
The Institutional Coherence Initiative exists because governance vacuums don't stay empty. They fill, either with public infrastructure built in the interest of everyone, or with proprietary products built in the interest of those who can afford them. We chose to build the former before the latter became the only option.
What a public regulator would actually mean
Before Sarbanes-Oxley, corporate financial accountability was largely voluntary. Companies could claim sound governance while their books told a different story. Enron happened. WorldCom happened. The resulting legislation didn't ask corporations to be ethical. It required them to demonstrate that they were, through auditable, standardized, public reporting.
A public AI regulator would do the same thing for institutional decision-making.
How ICI works without legal enforcement authority
ICI cannot fine anyone. We cannot compel disclosure. We have no subpoena power. What we have is something that, over time, may be more durable: the architecture of trust.
Institutions that commit to ICI's framework publish standardized audit reports. Those reports are generated by the Coherence Checker — our open-source governance middleware — and cryptographically logged so they cannot be altered after the fact.
For this to work, society must choose. Workers who have options must choose to work for institutions that publish coherent audit reports over those that don't. Trust becomes the currency that coherent institutions earn and incoherent ones spend down.
The Institutional Coherence Initiative is a public-interest project building open-source, non-proprietary governance infrastructure for AI-integrated institutions.