Glossary

A continuing organizational system that pursues a purpose through delegated authority, coordinated work and persistent commitments, with a way to evaluate its outcomes.

An organizational software layer and reference project for autonomous organizations, positioned as an Operating System for Autonomous Organizations.

The owner-defined purpose, authority, constraints and resources within which an organization acts.

The person or body that establishes the organization’s mandate and retains the reserved decisions specified by that mandate.

The role responsible for organizing work, delegating execution and deciding acceptance within the mandate.

An execution system that selects and performs actions toward a task using available tools and context. It is a component, not sufficient evidence of an organization.

The execution scaffolding around a model: loop, tools, context handling and runtime controls. Claude Code and Codex provide their own harnesses.

The operating system, software, files, network and optional container in which the harness and tools execute.

The software layer that coordinates organizational purpose, authority, work, durable state and evaluation above an ordinary operating system.

A named responsibility with expected behavior, authority boundaries and acceptance criteria. A role and a running agent are different things.

A bounded unit of work with an owner, criteria, state and an artifact or other verifiable outcome.

The inspectable output of work, such as a document, code change, dataset or recorded action result.

An assessment of an artifact against recorded criteria by a reviewer distinct from its executor.

Records that survive a model session and describe tasks, decisions, events, commitments and execution outcomes.

Retained information used to recover context or guide decisions; its authority depends on provenance and freshness.

A recorded occurrence or due condition that may cause work through an explicit delivery and acknowledgement protocol.

A durable account of completed work, unresolved outcomes and the next intended action for recovery.

An attempted action whose external outcome is not yet known. Reconcile its outcome before repeating it.

The ability to decide and act within a bounded mandate, described relative to task, time and human involvement.

A decentralized autonomous organization, commonly using blockchain-based rules and governance; it is not a synonym for every AO.

A classification by explicit dimensions. The Axiom AO taxonomy is a versioned proposal, not an established international standard.

Inspectable records supporting a claim under specified conditions, versions and limits.

Linked records of authority, decisions, actions and outcomes that allow the course of work to be reconstructed.

Explicit limits on the time, compute, money, storage or tool access available to organizational work.