Kepil README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Kepil listing page.
Kepil
Accountability layer for AI agents. Give every agent a passport, put every action through one gate, and keep a log that cannot be rewritten afterwards.
53% of organisations have had an AI agent exceed its intended permissions. 48% of agents in production run with no monitoring at all. Only 22% treat an agent as an entity with its own identity. — Cloud Security Alliance and State of AI Agent Security, 2026
Kepil is what the other 78% are missing: identity, mandate, enforcement, evidence — and the part nobody else does, undo.
Русская версия: README.ru.md
What it does
Passport. Every agent version gets an immutable card: who built it, who runs it, what it does, what it will never do, its risk class, its autonomy class, its limits, and when its risks are due for review. A new version is a new card; the old one is kept forever.
Mandate. A machine-readable power of attorney for one job: allowed actions, allowed systems, spending limits, a validity window, and which action types must be confirmed by a human. Anything not explicitly allowed is refused.
Gate. The single point through which an agent touches the outside world. Every action is checked against the mandate before a model is even called. Fail-closed: any error inside the check means refusal, never a pass.
Journal. Append-only JSONL where every record carries the hash of the one before it. Editing or deleting a record is detectable — by anyone, using an independent implementation:
Undo. The journal is a graph of actions, and every profession declares its compensating action. Kepil walks that graph backwards and stops honestly at the first step that cannot be undone. Agent platforms record what happened; this one puts it back.
Confirmations on your phone. Irreversible actions arrive in Telegram with two buttons — approve or return — so being accountable does not mean sitting at a laptop.
Use it from any MCP client
Kepil ships an MCP server, so an editor, an assistant or another agent can work through it — and every action still passes the same gate into the same journal.
Seven tools: list professions, create an order, run a step, read order status, see what is waiting for a human, verify the journal, read an agent passport.
One tool is deliberately missing: confirmation. If a model could approve an irreversible action, the human would drop out of the chain and the whole design would be pointless. The confirmation card goes to a person — in the panel or in Telegram — and no MCP client can press it. A test enforces this.
Guard your existing automations
Kepil has a small JSON API, so an n8n workflow, a Make scenario or your own script can ask permission before acting:
The answer is recorded in the journal, so later you can show on what grounds the automation did — or did not do — something. For n8n there is a ready node: n8n-nodes-kepil.
The API stays off until you set a token (panel → Settings, or
KEPIL_API_TOKEN). A panel bound to localhost is protected by the binding; a
programmatic interface is not, so it is disabled by default.
An agent here is never fully autonomous
AgentPassport refuses to be constructed with the autonomy class where a human
can no longer cancel a decision. That is a deliberate architectural limit rather
than a missing feature — see
ADR-0002. The gate enforces the
same rule regardless of what a profession definition claims.
Professions: behaviour as data, not code
An agent's job is a JSON description: ordered steps, boundaries, limits, irreversible action patterns, rollback rules. Adding a new kind of work means adding a file — or filling in a form in the panel. The dangerous parts stay in code and under test.
Five ship with the project: inbound leads, process automation, bookkeeping documents, AI-adoption audit, public-procurement packages.
Undo that stops honestly
An order's journal is a sequence of actions and every profession declares the compensating action for each, so the panel can walk it backwards: pick a window, and the pass runs from the last action towards earlier ones, stopping at the first one that cannot be undone. What will happen is shown before the button is pressed, naming the step where the pass will stop — an undo promise that quietly fails is worse than no undo at all. The result is recorded as an operator's decision, which is why neither the MCP server nor the JSON API can roll anything back: an agent undoing its own actions would be signing in somebody else's name.
The panel
python -m kepil.admin opens an operator console: orders, professions, agent
passports, a meter (actions, tokens, cost, human time replaced), the compliance
generator, the journal with chain verification and anchoring, and settings.
State is plain JSON files under KEPIL_DATA (default ./data). No database:
you can open them, read them, and attach them to a dispute.
The confirmation round trip is what witnesses the log
A hash chain proves the surviving records agree with each other. It says nothing
about what was removed: cut the journal at record 3, rewrite everything after it
with correct prev_hash values, and verification prints Integrity confirmed over
a shorter history that is perfectly consistent with itself.
The fix was already in the design without being used. The confirmation card leaves the writer process and goes to a person, in the panel or in Telegram, and that round trip is the one artifact produced outside the writer. So the card now carries the current chain head, the decision that comes back quotes the head it saw, and the journal records it.
A rewritten prefix now has to contradict a message sitting somewhere the writer cannot reach. Verification stops being a self-consistency check and becomes a second party's statement about what the log looked like at a given moment.
Records written after the last witnessed head stay unprotected. That is where the guarantee stops, and it says so.
This came from a reader, ANP2 Network, who described both the attack and the fix in one comment.
Survey: what the installation proves, and what a person must answer
A compliance survey is a list of questions bound to legal norms. Some of the answers are already in the installation — risk and autonomy class in the passport, documentation completeness in the pack, confirmations and stops in the journal. The rest a person has to answer: the provenance of training data, the feature list of a model, insurance contracts.
The panel runs a checklist and splits every item into three: closed by evidence from the installation, a gap, or needs a human. On a real installation about a fifth closes automatically. If it closed much more than that, the checklist would be incomplete.
Two properties are worth stating. A resolver returns a fact — "no high autonomy declared", "zero stops in the journal" — never a verdict of compliance; the conclusion and the signature stay with a person. And a checklist file references the name of a resolver declared in code and contains nothing executable, because otherwise a JSON file from elsewhere would be a way to run code on the machine that keeps the journal.
The integrity resolver reports the system's own weakness: if the chain root has never been fixed, or is fixed unsigned next to the journal, there is no outside witness and the whole history could be rewritten.
Compliance packs
Documentation requirements differ by country and change faster than code, so the
texts live outside the engine. The neutral pack shipped here follows
international practice (ISO/IEC 42001, record-keeping in the spirit of the EU AI
Act). Jurisdiction packs — for example Kazakhstan's AI Law No. 230-VIII with
order No. 95/НҚ — are dropped into $KEPIL_DATA/packs as files.
Design rules
- Zero dependencies. The core runs on the Python 3.11+ standard library, and CI fails the build if a third-party import appears. That keeps Kepil installable inside an air-gapped perimeter, and keeps the supply-chain attack surface of a tool that sees every action at zero.
- Values never enter the journal — only types, counts and hashes.
- The verifier is a separate implementation in another language. Proof that only its own author can check is not proof.
Related projects
| Project | Role |
|---|---|
| agent-trace | Independent journal verification and evidence packs (MIT) |
| AI-Gateway | PII and secret masking between your apps and external models |
| AutoGov | Discovery of shadow automations and the credentials they can reach |
Status
Alpha, 170 tests. Interfaces may still change. Nothing here is a legal opinion: before relying on generated documents, have them reviewed by a lawyer in your jurisdiction.
License
AGPL-3.0-or-later. Running a network service built on Kepil obliges you to release your own source under the same terms — or to take a commercial licence. See NOTICE.md.