Intent Provenance Protocol (IPP)

This document specifies the Intent Provenance Protocol (IPP), a cryptographic infrastructure standard for carrying verified human intent through chains of autonomous artificial intelligence agent actions. IPP defines the Intent Token -- a signed, bounded, and tamper-evident data structure that travels with every agentic action, preserving an unbroken, auditable lineage from the originating human principal to each terminal action executed on their behalf. As AI agents become primary actors in enterprise environments -- executing transactions, accessing sensitive data, orchestrating sub- agents, and operating across organizational boundaries -- the absence of a shared trust substrate creates systemic risk to organizational accountability, regulatory compliance, and legal liability attribution. IPP addresses this gap by establishing a protocol layer that operates above cryptographic authentication and below application logic, making human intent a first-class, verifiable primitive in agentic systems. IPP introduces four foundational properties -- Lineage, Boundedness, Non-repudiation, and Interoperability -- enforced through a combination of Ed25519 digital signatures, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), and a Narrowing Invariant that prevents any derived token from exceeding its parent's authorized scope. The protocol is framework-agnostic, cloud-agnostic, and designed for open implementation across the ecosystem of AI orchestration platforms.