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Technical Charter: cMCP

Proposed hosting: Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF).
Status: Pre-acceptance draft: effective upon host organization acceptance.

Note for external contributors: This charter is a working draft and has not yet been accepted by a host organization. Governance terms, IP policy, and trademark ownership described here are proposed, not final. Do not assume binding foundation commitments until formal acceptance.

Version: 0.1 (aligned with gateway v0.1)

1. Mission

The cMCP project develops and maintains an open implementation of the Confidential MCP (Model Context Protocol) gateway: hardware-attested policy enforcement for AI agent tool calls. The mission is to make tool-call authorization cryptographically verifiable by any party, without trusting the operator, without requiring closed infrastructure, and without vendor lock-in to any silicon vendor, cloud provider, or AI platform.

2. Scope

The project includes:

  • cMCP Gateway: the reference open-source implementation of the confidential gateway, including the gRPC/HTTP proxy, policy engine, and hardware attestation bridge.
  • Hardware Provider API: the normalized interface (BaseProvider) for integrating TEE platforms (TPM, AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, and others).
  • Python SDK: the cmcp-gateway package and client libraries for policy authoring and runtime integration.
  • TRACE integration: built-in emission of TRACE Trust Records for every attested tool call (see agentrust-io/trace-spec).
  • Agent Manifest binding: verification of agent identity via Agent Manifest at tool-call time (see agentrust-io/agent-manifest).
  • Integration examples: working examples across financial services, healthcare, and multi-tenant SaaS deployment patterns.

Out of scope: AI model governance beyond tool-call enforcement, hardware TEE platform SDKs, network-level policy outside the MCP protocol boundary, and MCP server implementations themselves.

3. Technical Steering Committee

Upon host organization acceptance, governance transitions from the current Project Lead model to a Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

Composition: 3–7 members. No single organization may hold more than 40% of TSC seats. The founding Project Lead (Imran Siddique, OPAQUE Systems) holds one founding seat for the v1.0 release cycle.

Election: TSC members are elected annually by active contributors (at least one merged pull request in the preceding 12 months). Each contributor has one vote.

Quorum: Two-thirds of TSC members must participate for a vote to be valid.

Decisions:

  • Patch releases and editorial changes: simple TSC majority
  • Minor releases (new hardware providers, new policy primitives): two-thirds TSC majority + 7-day public comment
  • Breaking API changes (gateway protocol, provider API): two-thirds TSC majority + 30-day public comment + explicit migration guide

Meetings: Monthly public TSC meeting. Notes published within 5 business days.

4. Intellectual Property Policy

All contributions must be made under the terms of LICENSE. Contributors must sign commits with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). No contribution may incorporate material covered by a patent the contributor is unwilling to license royalty-free to conforming implementations.

Code and schemas are licensed under Apache 2.0 with Patent Promise (see LICENSE).

5. Trademark Policy

"cMCP" and "cMCP-compatible" as project and conformance marks are currently held by OPAQUE Systems, Inc. Upon host organization acceptance, trademark ownership transfers to AAIF under their standard trademark policy.

Use of "cMCP-compatible" to describe a gateway deployment requires that the implementation satisfies the hardware attestation and policy enforcement requirements defined in the project documentation for the version being claimed.

6. Relationship to other projects

cMCP builds on and does not replace:

  • MCP (Model Context Protocol, Anthropic): the underlying tool-call protocol that cMCP extends with attestation
  • TRACE (agentrust-io/trace-spec): governance record emitted per attested tool call
  • Agent Manifest (agentrust-io/agent-manifest): agent identity bound at tool-call time
  • SPIFFE / SPIRE: workload identity for gateway and agent services
  • RATS / EAT (RFC 9711): attestation evidence format
  • OPA / Cedar: policy engine integration surface

7. Transition timeline

Milestone Target
v0.1 developer preview: CC Summit announcement June 2026
Hardware provider API stabilization, TRACE v0.2 integration Q3 2026
AAIF project proposal submission Q3 2026
v1.0 stable release under TSC governance 2027

8. Amendments

Amendments to this charter require a two-thirds TSC majority and a 30-day public comment period. Before host organization acceptance, amendments require Project Lead approval and 14-day notice to contributors.