Alpha · reproducible proof
Verify the gateway, not the pitch.
WARD turns a public policy into a server-side decision. On a dedicated synthetic demo path, invented marked values are omitted before the response is assembled for a declared AI requester.
A three-command canary
Run the human request, run the declared crawler request, then compare the protected markup. The crawler response also carries the policy hash, action, identity status and event id.
1.Fetch the human response
curl -sS -o /tmp/ward-human.html \ https://getward.org/ward-canary
2.Fetch the declared crawler response
curl -sS -D - -o /tmp/ward-bot.html \ -A 'GPTBot/1.0' \ https://getward.org/ward-canary
3.Compare protected markup
grep -n 'data-ward="redact"' /tmp/ward-human.html grep -n 'data-ward="redact"' /tmp/ward-bot.html
Expected: the first grep finds protected server-rendered blocks; the second does not. A User-Agent claim is labelled claimed, not verified.
What this proves
Demonstrated now
- The policy is public and machine-readable.
- Known requester strings map to explicit uses.
- The policy produces allow, observe, or redact decisions.
- Protected values are absent from the complete rendered response.
- Mandatory legal notices remain available to detected requesters.
- The response identifies the decision and exact policy hash.
Not claimed
- A User-Agent alone does not authenticate the operator.
- An event does not prove later training or downstream use.
- WARD is not an adopted IETF, W3C, or EU standard.
- WARD does not by itself establish legal compliance.
- Unmarked or client-fetched secrets are not automatically protected.
Status
Alpha reference implementation
Live identity
Claimed via User-Agent
Policy SHA-256
9f863eab1df80b98…
Try to break the contract
The useful next step is an independent implementation or a failing test case—not another promise. The protocol repository contains the alpha contract and conformance tests.
Inspect the source and tests →|Integration guide →