Enforce AI access preferences at the origin.
WARD turns a public, machine-readable policy into a server-side decision before content leaves your website.
Policy in. Allow, observe, or redact out—with an inspectable receipt.
The smallest useful product
One request. One explicit decision.
01
Inspect
Recognize a declared AI requester and the uses it represents.
02
Evaluate
Apply ward.json defaults and the most specific path rule.
03
Enforce
Allow, observe, or omit marked blocks before delivery.
04
Receipt
Return the action, identity status, policy hash and event id.
Trust boundary
Detection is not authentication.
A crawler name in a User-Agent is useful for routing, but it can be spoofed. WARD carries identity confidence with every decision instead of silently treating a claim as proof.
See the decision model →claimedThe request declares a known crawler string.
verifiedAn origin adapter confirms the source against provider evidence.
mismatchThe claim fails verification; fail-closed policy may apply.
Evidence, with limits
What the receipt can—and cannot—say
It records
- — the declared or verified requester identity
- — the intended uses associated with that requester
- — the matched policy rule and its SHA-256 hash
- — the gateway action and a deduplicated event id
It does not prove
- — who controlled a spoofed request
- — that a downstream model trained on the response
- — that an organization is legally compliant
- — that unmarked content was never obtained elsewhere
EU policy fit
A technical building block, not a legal verdict.
EU copyright rules and the AI Act create demand for machine-readable rights reservations. WARD explores the origin enforcement and evidence layer around that requirement. It should interoperate with, not replace, emerging work such as W3C TDM Reservation Protocol and IETF AIPREF.
Suitability depends on the rights holder, use case, implementation and legal interpretation. WARD is not legal advice and is not an official EU, IETF or W3C standard.
Useful for
- Publisher and CMS gateway pilots
- Policy-to-enforcement experiments
- Crawler identity verification adapters
- Conformance and evidence research
A real alpha is ready to challenge.
We are looking for one independent implementation, one publisher pilot, and crawler operators willing to test the identity and policy boundaries.