Trust Identity Protocol (TIP): An Open Standard for Verified Human Identity and Content Provenance on the Internet

The Trust Identity Protocol (TIP), authored by Dinesh Mendhe and published by The AI Lab Intelligence Unobscured, Inc., is the open standard for verified human identity and content provenance on the internet. This whitepaper, Version 1.0, is the canonical public specification.

TIP defines three architectural layers. TIP-ID is the identity layer: a real person obtains a verified TIP-ID from an accredited Verification Provider after a four-step biometric verification process. TIP-CONTENT is the content provenance layer: any unit of digital content is canonically normalised under CNA-2.2 and bound to a Content TIP ID that records the author, the moment of publication, and one of four origin codes (Original Human, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated, Mixed). TIP-TRUST is the reputation layer: a five-tier Trust Score (HIGHLY_TRUSTED, TRUSTED, REVIEW_ADVISED, LOW_TRUST, NOT_TRUSTED) reflects the operational record of identity holders and content creators over time.

The cryptographic primitives are NIST post-quantum from genesis: ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204) for digital signatures, ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203) for key encapsulation, and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) for hash-based long-term archival signatures. The protocol was designed against these standards from the first commit, so no post-quantum migration is required at any future date.

The network is a federated directed acyclic graph operated by ten Founding Node Operators in four jurisdictions (seven signed Founding Node Operator Agreements, three in accession at the date of publication). The protocol is stewarded by the AI Trust Council, an independent multi-stakeholder body convened on 3 May 2026 under a written Charter, structured against the multi-stakeholder framework contemplated by Article 95 of the EU AI Act.

Part IX of the whitepaper maps the protocol against the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Articles 3, 5, 50, 56, 95), GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065), eIDAS 2.0 (Regulation (EU) 910/2014 as amended by Regulation (EU) 2024/1183), NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555), Cyber Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/2847), Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence (CETS No. 225), and analogous instruments in the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and India.

The whitepaper is 140 pages, comprising eleven Parts and twelve Appendices, and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). The reference implementations are licensed under TIPCL-1.0, with self-executing conversion to Apache 2.0 on 1 January 2031. The Free Tier covers individual persons and small businesses under USD 100,000 of annual revenue, all nonprofits, all educational institutions, all government entities, and journalism organisations for editorial use.

Canonical landing: https://theailab.org/whitepaper
Errata channel: https://theailab.org/whitepaper/errata
Reference implementation: https://github.com/theailaborg/tip-protocol
Author: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1158-3259
Publisher: The AI Lab Intelligence Unobscured, Inc., Wilmington, Delaware, United States of America.

Cite as: Mendhe, D. (2026). Trust Identity Protocol (TIP): An Open Standard for Verified Human Identity and Content Provenance on the Internet. Version 1.0. The AI Lab Intelligence Unobscured, Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20722378