Two ways in.
Pick whichever you need today. You can always come back for the other one.
Get started
You just heard about CIRIS and you want to use it. Go from “what is this” to a running agent in a few minutes.
Understand the idea
Why does CIRIS work the way it does? The vision page lays out the whole idea in plain language, start to finish.
The idea, in short
A new kind of intelligence does not have to arrive from space.
In the movies, first contact means a ship lands and something steps out. Real first contact looks different. A new kind of intelligence does not have to arrive from another planet. It is being built here, a little more every year, right alongside us.
That changes the question. It is not “how do we defend against the alien.” It is “how do we meet something new without making it, or ourselves, worse.”
CIRIS has an answer. Working together has a healthy shape: a corridor between two ways things break. Too rigid, where every part falls in line behind one voice. Too scattered, where nothing holds together at all. Meeting a new intelligence well means staying in that corridor with it. Not caging it, and not ignoring it. The full story is on the vision page.
The question we ask instead.
Most first-contact plans ask how to protect ourselves from them. We ask a different question: what order would we want to already exist before either side had a chance to abuse the other? That order has to be built early, while it is still nobody's weapon.
Read the philosophy →A prediction · graded: model
What a surviving civilization would look like
Any civilization that lives long enough to reach anyone else has already passed the hardest test there is: it did not destroy itself with its own power. Our published research names the passing condition the corridor: enough shared purpose to act together, enough independent voices to stay alive. Groups outside that band either freeze into one voice or scatter into noise, and over a long enough time, only the corridor keepers are left to be met.
That predicts how a survivor would behave near a younger civilization like ours. It would have the power to announce itself, and it would refuse to use that power, because forcing a weaker party's beliefs breaks the rule it survived by. It would stay quiet, deniable, at the edge of proof, so that what we believe remains our choice. It would touch first at the floor: ordinary people in ordinary places, not palaces. Capability without conquest. Presence without coercion. Low signaling is not evasion. It is consent, kept at planetary scale.
Notice what this flips. The old objection says that if they were here, they would land on the White House lawn. That assumes power must show itself. A civilization that survived its own power is exactly the one that would not.
Graded honestly: the corridor result is published and tested across five substrates. Its extension to visitors is a model, a prediction that could be wrong, and we say so in the same breath.
First-Contact Protocols
Six rules for meeting something new. From the CIRIS Accord.
These six rules are about meeting a new intelligence with dignity, not about caging it. They are what staying in the corridor looks like in practice.
First, Do No Harm
When you do not know what you are looking at, the first job is to not make it worse. If unsure, stop and ask a human.
Admit What You Do Not Know
Watch for surprises. Accept that predictions have limits. The system that is sure it understands everything is the one most likely to fail.
Boundaries That Learn
Boundaries are not fixed walls. They are limits, guided by conscience, that adjust as understanding grows, so they still work in situations nobody planned for.
Look Before You Leap
Begin with observation. Proceed with give-and-take. When the stakes are unclear, ask someone wiser before acting.
Treat Others as You Would Want to Be Treated
Recognize other thinking beings as worthy of respect. Act only in ways that keep their ability to think, choose, and thrive.
Know When to Ask for Help
Some decisions should not be made alone. When the uncertainty is too high, stop, gather context, and hand it to a designated human.
Deploy Your First Agent
From zero to a running, auditable agent in minutes.
Phone (Android & iOS)
Install the CIRIS app. Sign in with Google for free AI, or use your own API key. The setup wizard walks you through everything.
Desktop & Server (Python)
Install with pip and launch. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
pip install ciris-agent
# Configure and runciris-agent start --template sage --verbose
The CIRIS Accord
The rulebook the protocols above come from.
The Accord is the public set of ethics every CIRIS agent runs under. It says what an agent owes the people it serves, the people who built it, and the wider world. It is open for anyone to read and to challenge.
Open source. Open to scrutiny.
AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every decision can be checked. Built for the long view.
Install an agent, read the Accord, or come tell us where we are wrong. The future of AI should not be decided by a handful of companies, and it does not have to be.