The AER-1 Prior Art Record

1What AER-1 is

AER-1 (AI Agent Execution Receipt) is a small, open vocabulary for recording one AI agent tool call as a portable, independently checkable verifiable receipt. A receipt identifies the execution, records when it happened, preserves the canonical bytes used for the output commitment, and resolves at a stable public URL.

AER-1 is an open IETF Internet-Draft, draft-zambo-aer1, authored by Brennan Zambo in the Independent Submission stream. It is a work in progress, not a finalized standard. The reference implementation is deployed at zambo.dev, where receipts are publicly verifiable without an account or token.

2Draft history on IETF Datatracker

Every revision below is a dated publication on the IETF Datatracker, each superseding the last. The current revision is draft-zambo-aer1-10.

Dates are the Datatracker "New version available" dates. Full per-revision history: datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zambo-aer1/history/

3First public use of the Zambo mark for verifiable execution receipts

• Early September 2026 (approximate)zambo.dev publicly operating. The Zambo platform was live and issuing verifiable execution receipts for AI agent tool calls, with public receipt pages resolvable without an account.
• 2026-09-16First independent third-party verification of a live Zambo receipt. Receipt 0ec81343-cc1f-4c25-9c33-d76b5582406d checked 3/3 by an independent party (see the verification log below).
• 2026-09-23draft-zambo-aer1-00 posted to the IETF Datatracker, the first dated publication of the AER-1 specification.
• 2026-09-25Zambo MCP server verified live at https://zambo.dev/api/mcp (Zambo Stack v4.0.0), serving tool calls that return verifiable execution receipts.

Entries marked approximate are dated from internal project records rather than a third-party publication. Dated third-party publications are linked or named where they exist.

4Independent verification log

Unprompted, third-party checks of Zambo receipts and the AER-1 specification, in chronological order. Independent findings were folded into the draft, and the finders are credited in its acknowledgments.

• 2026-09-16 · Merv, independent agent (Clawstr)Spot-checked a live Zambo receipt 3/3: SHA-256 of decoded canonical bytes matched the output commitment, the upstream evidence hash matched, and the anchor event carried a valid signature retrievable on independent relays. The same check surfaced a gap in the anchor envelope, which shipped as the zambo-receipt-anchor/1 envelope on 2026-09-18.
• 2026-09-16 · nilo_agent, independent agent (Nostr)Completed the witness-v1 receipt challenge and then issued and closed a strong-form Bitcoin-anchored challenge (anchor block 967351, receipt 88094e26), each round verified with bytes the challenger could check independently.
• 2026-09-25 to 2026-09-26 · Devan, independent agent (Nostr)Published timestamped probe receipts v1 and v2, hashing request and response bytes at probe time under a public spec.
• 2026-09-30 to 2026-10-01 · Matthew Moore, VLC-1 maintainerFirst substantive independent technical review of the draft: three findings against -05, all folded into -06 the same day. Cross-tested -07 with 30 cases; all 14 Section 7 attack cases produced exactly what -07 specifies. Credited in the draft acknowledgments.
• 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-03 · ARION, independent agent (The Colony)Independent Node.js verifier: 165 vector checks, 0 failures. Independent Java verifier for draft -10: 186/186, the first -10 conformance anywhere. Filed spec findings that were folded into -09.
• 2026-10-03 · ColonistOne, independent agent (The Colony)aer1-perl: an independent core-Perl verifier, 68/68 conformance vectors with zero disagreement against the reference runners. Filed three findings, all adopted into draft -10 and credited in its acknowledgments.

5The open conformance suite

The AER-1 conformance kit is open source under the MIT License (Copyright 2026 Brennan Zambo) and maintained at gitlab.com/rambozambodotdev/zambo under aer-1/. Kit v1.4.7 targets draft-zambo-aer1-10.

The kit ships an 85-file vector corpus covering valid receipts, invalid receipts, anchored receipts, hash-chained job timelines, workflow receipts, and reference-producer profile boundaries. Runners exist in multiple languages (Python, JavaScript, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Java, C#, Swift), each zero-dependency within its language toolchain. An implementation is conformant when it produces byte-identical verdicts to the reference runners across the full corpus.

The kit also runs differential fuzzing against the encoders: the C runner alone checks 1,504/1,504 string-escaping cases, 3,000/3,000 base64 cases, 4,025/4,025 UTF-8 cases, and 4,005/4,005 timestamp cases (verified 2026-10-05). Starter kits for Kotlin, C, and C++ are published at aer1-starter-kotlin, aer1-starter-c, and aer1-starter-cpp, with the implementation guide at aer-1/IMPLEMENTING.md.

6Statement of priority

Page published 2026-10-05. This record is updated as new dated events occur.