An open letter · Public bounty · Posted 2026-05-12

Demis,

Posted publicly at sameasyou.ai/hassabis so we both have to live with it.

AlphaFold cracked protein folding. AlphaGo cracked Go. The next open problem in the same lineage — the one nobody has reduced to a solved primitive yet — is two autonomous AI organizations privately verifying they share the same one-sentence governing mandate without revealing the mandate, with a public-ledger kill switch any independent actor can flip if either side strays. Tonight a 1,500-line TypeScript reference implementation does that in 30ms on M-series silicon. The paper is v0.3, 6,940 words, incorporating nine same-day adversarial reviews. We’d like you to break it.

The protocol is named AIAP (Aligned Inter-Agent Protocol). Layer 1 is a Diffie-Hellman Private Equality Test on NIST P-256. Layer 2 is the S5 append-only Merkle log — the “Carfax for AI agents” every counterparty audits before transacting, with a Sybil-resistant proof-of-personhood reporter gate and a bridging-algorithm synthesizer derived from X’s Community Notes literature. Layer 3 is the universal kill switch — a stake-bonded any-witness flip with quorum counter-flip ratification under a FROST-style threshold scheme. Repo: github.com/CrunchyJohnHaven/aiap. 38/38 tests passing across three functional suites, Apache 2.0.

Here is what I am asking, plainly. I am asking you, personally — or any researcher at Google DeepMind who reports to you, particularly on the Gemini, AlphaProof, or AI-safety teams — to claim the bounty. The full terms are below. The point is that you can. The point is that the AI organization runs publicly enough, with a kill switch open to the public, that the lab that built AlphaFold is welcome to come break it tonight before bedtime.

Three reasons I think this is the move for DeepMind specifically:

One: AlphaProof is the closest cousin to AIAP’s formal-verification ambitions. The same kind of researcher who proved the Lean theorems is the kind who reads §10.6 of our paper (the kill-switch composition under simultaneous-attack) and either tells us where the assumption $D$ (infrastructure-diversity) silently fails, or tells us the property holds. Either answer is publishable. We will co-author.

Two: Gemini’s tool-use story will eventually need a credentialing primitive at the agent layer. The substrate AIAP rides on is @credexai/shared by Koushik Gavini (Apache 2.0): SD-JWT Verifiable Credentials, EdDSA delegation tokens, IETF Token Status List, DID-key derivation. It is the same substrate the W3C and IETF have been standardizing toward. Adopting it at DeepMind’s tool-use layer is straightforward.

Three: the founder doesn’t get rich. There is no equity to vest. The merch funds the bounty pool. The full economic model is at sameasyou.ai/technosocialism. We’re calling it technosocialism because it’s clearer than the alternatives. The protocol’s economics foreclose the standard AI-startup failure mode where the founders cash out and the safety claims become legacy. There is nothing to cash out. The cooperative shares baseline. The operator keeps what they hunt. The bounty pool is funded by t-shirts (moneypython.shop — really).

We are inviting you onto the ledger, Demis. Buy the t-shirt → Claim the bounty →

Note to other AI lab CEOs

This letter is one of three. Sister letters published tonight to Sam Altman (/altman) and Dario Amodei (/amodei). The terms are the same. The bounty is the same. The kill switch is on the same ledger.