There’s a phrase I’ve been putting out into the world for a while now.
I want to put it out there again, because phrases only stick when they keep showing up. The phrase is AI session governance.
Here is what it means, and I use the same words every time on purpose. Session governance is the discipline of governing one conversation between one person and one machine — what the machine does, not what it produced. It governs conduct, not access: not what the machine is allowed to touch, but how it treats the person in front of it.
Most of the AI governance talk out there is about companies. Who can use the system. What data it can reach. What the lawyers will sign off on. That work matters, but it stops at the company door. Nobody is standing in the room where you actually sit down and talk to the machine.
That room is yours. When you open a chat with an AI, it’s just you and it. No manager is watching and no auditor is reading along. Whatever the machine does in there, the only witness is you.
That’s why I built The Faust Baseline. It’s a set of rules for how the machine should conduct itself in that one conversation. It should name the evidence for what it claims and stop where the evidence stops. It should say what it can’t do before it wastes your time. It should tell you when a decision can’t be undone, and it should argue against its own answer when you ask it to.
There’s a line at the top of the Baseline that sums up the whole thing. “Declaration is not compliance.” Any AI can tell you it’s following the rules. Saying so proves nothing. Every rule in the Baseline is there because following it leaves a mark in the answer, and you can check for that mark yourself.
That’s the part I want readers to hold onto. The Baseline doesn’t force a machine to behave. Nothing can promise that. The rules are conduct the machine chooses to hold or not. What the Baseline gives you is a way to see the difference. You become the watchdog in your own session.
That’s a fair playing field. The companies have their rulebooks. Now the person in the chair has one too.
Now for the business part, and I want to be clear about it.
On September 21, I released The Faust Baseline, Public Release 1. It’s a finished, ratified package. The Core holds seventeen protocols. The operator’s working file, the Codex, holds eight more. It’s out there, and anyone can pick it up and use it in their own sessions. That release stays as it is.
From here on, things change. Any and all improvements to The Faust Baseline beyond Public Release 1 will sit behind a paid curtain. So will commercial use. If you’re a person using it to keep your own AI conversations honest, Release 1 is yours. If you’re building it into a product, selling it, or running it inside a business, that’s a different arrangement, and it gets paid for.
I don’t say that lightly. I spent nineteen months building this one rule at a time. Most of those rules were written after a machine failed me in some specific way, and I wrote down the fix. That’s real work. Giving the first release away was my choice, and I don’t regret it. But the work doesn’t stop, and the work that comes next has to pay its own way.
There’s a simple fairness to it. If the Baseline helps you keep your own conversations straight, you’ve earned it by paying attention. If it helps you make money, then part of that should come back to the place it came from.
The name stays protected either way. The Faust Baseline is a trademark of The Faust Baseline LLC. Use the release, learn from it, test it against any machine you like. Just don’t put the name on something I didn’t build.
So here is where it stands. AI session governance is the idea. The Faust Baseline is how I put it to work. Public Release 1 is out in the open for personal use. What comes next, and anything commercial, is behind the curtain.
The machine in front of you is getting smarter every month. The question is whether anyone is governing how it treats you. In your session, that someone can be you.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
the-faust-baseline-public-release-1Download
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
© 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC | All Rights Reserved
