About this project

The Rules That Run the World is a white paper proposing the Open Law Reference Framework (OLRF): a constitutional infrastructure for machine-executable law in the age of autonomous AI agents.

The paper argues that the deployment of AI agents in normative functions of the state requires a new class of public infrastructure. Not smarter models, but a constitutional foundation on which those models can operate accountably: published decision trees linked to statutory text, a public registry, agent certification, and structured audit trails.

Author

Joerg Resch is Innovation Manager at SPRIND, the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. He works on the question of how the state will function in the age of AI, with a focus on Law as Code as constitutional infrastructure.

How to contribute

This paper is published under CC BY 4.0 and is open for review and improvement. There are three ways to engage:

Annotate any passage directly using the Hypothesis sidebar (visible on every page). Select text, add your comment. This is the lowest-friction way to provide feedback on specific arguments or formulations.

Open an issue on OpenCode for substantive objections, missing arguments, new sources, or architectural questions that go beyond a single paragraph.

Submit a merge request with concrete text changes. Every accepted change is versioned and attributed in the commit history.

Version history

The paper is versioned in its OpenCode repository. Each release is tagged, and the changelog documents what changed and why. The website always shows the current version.

License

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, provided you give appropriate credit.