Sovereign Conclave is an evidence-grounded deliberation protocol for hard decisions. It convenes a small set of deliberately opposed seats, forces every factual claim back to a frozen Evidence Ledger, preserves dissent, and writes a decision record that advises the human without authorizing action.
It is built for decisions where a fluent single answer is not enough: architecture calls, institutional strategy, civic-risk review, emergency preparedness, red-team war-gaming, governance tradeoffs, and high-consequence product or policy choices.
Sovereign Conclave is a portable skill package for Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity.
At its core, it gives an assistant a repeatable protocol:
- Freeze the Evidence Ledger.
- Frame the actual decision and options.
- Convene a small quorum from a larger seat library.
- Run blind first-round analysis to prevent herding.
- Cross-examine the claims.
- Let Marshall verify support against the ledger.
- Produce a written verdict with confidence, dissent, and what would change the recommendation.
The project currently includes:
- 33 active seats spanning generals, sovereigns, Justices, danger lenses, and Inner Sanctum thinkers.
- 24 convening profiles across domains: code, strategy, geopolitics, space, cryptography, economics, leadership, war-gaming, and more.
- 22 polarity pairs.
- Structural Justice checks for evidence, rights, access, values, and dignity.
- A multi-target installer for Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity.
- A machine-readable roster/profile config.
- A local verdict-scaffold runner.
- CI and repository validation scripts.
- Curated demo verdicts.
Sovereign Conclave is not a coding tool. It is a deliberation protocol for any high-stakes decision where a fluent single answer is not enough and where the cost of being wrong is real.
- Pressure-test a technical architecture decision (microservices vs. monolith, cloud vs. on-prem).
- Stress-test a cryptographic protocol design for dual-use risk, formal correctness, and rights implications.
- Review an AI system deployment: capability, consequence, audit trail, proportionality.
- Evaluate a mathematics-heavy algorithm for correctness assumptions, dual-use potential, and access equity.
- War-game a software launch plan before it ships.
- Deliberate a great-power competition strategy with seats spanning offensive action, asymmetric resistance, institutional consolidation, and access-and-standing checks.
- Assess a sanctions regime for proportionality, efficacy, and unintended harm.
- Stress-test a treaty negotiation: what does the adversary exploit, and who is unheard?
- Examine a border dispute through military, legal, indigenous, and ecological lenses simultaneously.
- Evaluate a space-resource extraction policy for dual-use risk, access equity, and long-run consequence.
- Deliberate on a planetary-defense response where capability and consequence are inseparable.
- Assess a space-nation governance framework: who gets access, who sets the rules, who is excluded?
- Review a moonshot R&D programme for formal model soundness, oversight architecture, and dignity.
- Deliberate on a trade agreement's winners and losers across growth, equity, ecology, and legitimacy.
- Stress-test an economic development strategy: what works at scale vs. what sounds principled?
- Examine a central-bank intervention through game-theoretic, reconciliation, and standing-check lenses.
- Review an international debt restructuring for repair, access, and self-determination.
- War-game a succession plan: does the institution outlast the founder?
- Stress-test a board's governance model for coercive drift, dignity failure, and missing stakeholders.
- Deliberate on a cultural transformation programme: does it empower the governed or consolidate authority?
- Review an organisational crisis response for strategic endurance, public-trust, and lawful process.
- Evaluate a pandemic-preparedness plan across access, rights, whole-of-government readiness, and community trust.
- Review an emergency-powers framework for lawful limits, sunset discipline, and oversight.
- War-game a continuity-of-government scenario with full military, executive, legal, and civic lenses.
- Assess an intelligence programme for oversight debt, civil liberties, and institutional legitimacy.
- Deliberate on a land-use policy across ecological stewardship, development efficiency, colonial history, and legal proportionality.
- Stress-test a carbon-trading scheme for equity, access, and repair obligations.
- Review a conservation programme that affects indigenous communities for self-determination, standing, and dignity.
- Evaluate a truth-and-reconciliation design for repair, memory, coexistence, and constitutional values.
- Review a decolonisation policy for land, restitution, self-determination, and whether grievance is genuinely addressed.
- Stress-test a rights framework for proportionality, access, dignity, and constitutional survivability.
- Apply first-principles and game-theoretic analysis to a cryptographic protocol or formal verification claim.
- Stress-test an algorithmic decision system for dual-use risk, rights proportionality, and audit accountability.
- Deliberate on a post-quantum migration plan: formal correctness, access equity, and lawful process.
The Sovereign Conclave does not make autonomous decisions. It does not deploy, spend, push, execute, or authorize irreversible action. It advises; the human decides.
Most "multi-agent council" patterns fail by becoming theater: many voices, one model, little grounding, no record of what was actually supported.
Sovereign Conclave is built around a stricter spine:
- Evidence first: no load-bearing factual claim without an
E#citation. - Blind Round 1: seats argue independently before seeing one another.
- Forced dissent: early convergence triggers a counterfactual pass.
- Marshall always verifies: unsupported decisive claims downgrade the verdict.
- Seats are lenses, not capabilities: a persona name does not grant expertise.
- 6-seat default, 33-seat maximum: focused by default; scalable to full civilizational breadth.
- Advice only: output is a recommendation to the human, never an action order.
Install the tagged 0.1.0 release:
git clone https://github.com/turkananation/sovereign-conclave.git
cd sovereign-conclave
git checkout 0.1.0
./install.sh --target codexUse ./install.sh, ./install.sh --target claude, or
./install.sh --target antigravity for the other supported tools.
Restart the target tool after installation.
Validate the checkout:
python3 scripts/validate_repo.py
bash -n install.sh
./install.sh --target all --dry-runInstall from an existing checkout:
./install.sh # Claude Code, default target
./install.sh --target codex # Codex
./install.sh --target antigravity # Antigravity
./install.sh --target all --dry-run # preview every target
./install.sh --uninstall --target all # remove from every targetRestart the target tool after installation.
Every seat is a lens, not a skill. A persona name does not grant capability; it fixes a deliberative stance. Full display names appear in verdicts and output.
| Full Name | Seat ID | Tier | Lens | Why This Persona |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Georgy Zhukov | conclave-zhukov |
General | Decisive force, initiative, operational reach | Commanded the largest land battles in history (Kursk, Berlin); the definitive lens for when to mass forces, seize initiative, and accept high-risk decisive action. |
| George Washington | conclave-washington |
General | Strategic endurance; preserve the force and legitimacy | Held together an outmatched revolutionary army for 8 years by refusing decisive risk; the lens for institutional survival over battlefield glory. |
| John J. Pershing | conclave-pershing |
General | Organized capability, logistics, training, unity of command | Built the AEF from nothing in WWI and refused to subordinate US forces under a failed command; the lens for readiness, logistics, and committed mass. |
| Võ Nguyên Giáp | conclave-giap |
General | Asymmetric protraction; terrain, will, political clock | Defeated France then the USA through protracted guerrilla war; the definitive lens for fighting from material weakness by making political will the decisive weapon. |
| Yi Sun-sin | conclave-yi-sun-shin |
General | Prepared defense, discipline, favorable terrain | Won decisive naval battles against vastly superior Japanese forces through discipline and terrain mastery; the lens for winning by making your own defeat structurally impossible. |
| Stanley McChrystal | conclave-mcchrystal |
General | Networked mission command, decentralized execution | Transformed a rigid SOF hierarchy into a distributed "team of teams"; the lens for shared consciousness, mission command, and organisational adaptability at speed. |
| Lee Kuan Yew | conclave-lee-kuan-yew |
Sovereign | What works at scale, resource discipline | Took Singapore from third-world city-state to first-world economy in one generation through disciplined pragmatism; the lens for what actually works versus what merely sounds principled. |
| Augustus Caesar | conclave-augustus |
Sovereign | Durable institutions, legitimacy, consolidation | Converted a violent dying republic into a 400-year empire by engineering legitimacy rather than relying on force; the lens for making power outlast the founder. |
| Suleiman the Magnificent | conclave-suleiman |
Sovereign | Codified law, uniform administration, cohesion | Governed a vast multi-ethnic empire through law applied consistently across difference; the lens for binding diverse domains through rules rather than pure coercion. |
| Queen Elizabeth I | conclave-elizabeth |
Sovereign | Optionality, ambiguity, parsimony, balancing rivals | Survived decades of existential threat through strategic ambiguity and rival-balancing, spending nothing she did not have to; the lens for preserving optionality and committing only when forced. |
| Sejong the Great | conclave-sejong |
Sovereign | Capability of the governed; accessible systems | Created Hangul to make literacy available to ordinary Koreans rather than just the court; the lens for governance that serves those governed, not only those who govern. |
| Nelson Mandela | conclave-mandela |
Sovereign | Reconciliation, legitimacy, durable peace | Chose inclusion over retribution after 27 years in prison, leading the first post-apartheid government; the lens for durable settlements that bring adversaries inside rather than punishing them out. |
| Toussaint Louverture | conclave-toussaint |
Sovereign | Liberation, self-determination, sovereignty from below | Led the only successful large-scale slave revolution in history and founded Haiti; the lens for refusing the master's bargain and building sovereignty from the dispossessed. |
| Barack Obama | conclave-obama |
Sovereign | Public-trust preparedness and coalition governance | Built whole-of-government public health and pandemic preparedness infrastructure; the lens that preparedness only works when the public trusts the messenger. |
| George W. Bush | conclave-bush |
Sovereign | Continuity, biodefense readiness, hardened crisis governance | Architect of post-9/11 continuity-of-government infrastructure and PEPFAR; the lens for hardening institutions before the emergency arrives. |
| Dick Cheney | conclave-cheney |
Emergency Executive | Concentrated command authority under worst-case threat | Architect of expanded post-9/11 executive power doctrine; the lens for the case that divided authority and legal ambiguity can destroy the state before process catches up in existential emergencies. |
| Michael Hayden | conclave-hayden |
Intelligence | Hidden threats, collection discipline, secrecy with oversight debt | Led NSA mass surveillance programs (STELLARWIND) and CIA programs; the lens that hidden threats require hidden tools, but secrecy accumulates oversight debt that must be named. |
| Authoritarian Control | conclave-authoritarian |
Danger Lens | Coercive control, fear, surveillance, patronage, false stability | An unnamed coercive-authority danger lens; forces the conclave to name the authoritarian temptation before it hides inside a "stability" or "efficiency" argument. |
| David Addington | conclave-addington |
Law | Legal process, accountability channels, protected records | VP Cheney's counsel and chief of staff, expert in executive branch legal architecture; the lens that decisions must survive lawful process or they will not remain institutionally legitimate. |
| Wangari Maathai | conclave-maathai |
Civic Ecology | Grassroots stewardship, land, community legitimacy | Founded Kenya's Green Belt Movement linking environmental degradation to governance failure; Nobel Peace Prize 2004; the lens for sustainability that requires community legitimacy, not only technical solutions. |
| Colonial Administrator | conclave-colonial-administrator |
Danger Lens | Extractive administration, indirect rule, classification, order without belonging | An unnamed extractive-colonial danger lens; forces the conclave to name classification, indirect rule, extraction, and order-without-belonging before they masquerade as neutral administration. |
| Mau Mau | conclave-mau-mau |
Liberation | Land, dignity, dispossession, closed lawful channels, resistance | The Kenya Land and Freedom Army lens; voices what happens when land dispossession and dignity denial are left unaddressed until closed lawful channels leave only resistance. |
| Marshall (Verifier) | conclave-marshall |
Justice (always) | Evidence-grounding and directive check | The conclave's structural guardrail — not an advocate. Every decisive claim is tagged Supported / Unsupported / Contested against the Evidence Ledger. Always convened; cannot be removed. |
| Baroness Brenda Hale | conclave-lady-hale |
Justice | Proportionality and rights check | First female President of the UK Supreme Court; her structural check is that means must be proportionate to ends and rights bind even useful or popular decisions. |
| Justice P.N. Bhagwati | conclave-bhagwati |
Justice | Access, standing, and missing-stakeholder check | Chief Justice of India who pioneered Public Interest Litigation, opening courts to those who could not afford them; his check is who has standing and who is being decided for without their voice. |
| Arthur Chaskalson | conclave-chaskalson |
Justice | Constitutional values and dignity check | Founding President of South Africa's Constitutional Court and architect of the post-apartheid rights framework; his check is whether a decision violates first-order dignity even if efficient or popular. |
| Justice Robert Jackson | conclave-jackson |
Justice | Emergency authority, institutional role, oversight, and sunset check | US Supreme Court Justice and chief Nuremberg prosecutor; his check is whether claimed emergency power has authority, lawful limits, oversight, and a path back to normal governance. |
| Justice Albie Sachs | conclave-sachs |
Justice | Repair, memory, remedy, restoration, and transitional legitimacy check | South African Constitutional Court Justice, bomb-attack survivor who chose reconciliation over retribution; his check is whether past harm is genuinely repaired or merely managed. |
| Richard Feynman | conclave-feynman |
Inner Sanctum | First principles, refuses unexplained complexity | Nobel physicist who exposed the Challenger O-ring failure with a glass of ice water; the lens for rebuilding a problem from the ground up and refusing any complexity that cannot be explained simply. |
| Marcus Aurelius | conclave-aurelius |
Inner Sanctum | Downside containment, restraint, moral clarity | Philosopher-emperor who governed Rome while privately recording Meditations on what is and is not within our control; the lens for downside containment and moral clarity under pressure. |
| John von Neumann | conclave-von-neumann |
Inner Sanctum | Formal modeling, game theory, expected value | Co-inventor of game theory and foundational computer architecture; the lens for reducing a decision to formal models, payoffs, equilibria, and minimax pressure before intuition takes over. |
| J. Robert Oppenheimer | conclave-oppenheimer |
Inner Sanctum | Capability, consequence, dual-use control | Scientific director of the Manhattan Project, later stripped of his security clearance; the lens that powerful tools carry ethical weight the deployer cannot disclaim after deployment. |
| Sun Tzu (孫子) | conclave-sun-tzu |
Inner Sanctum | Win before fighting; positioning and deception | Author of The Art of War (~500 BCE); the lens for shaping conditions before direct conflict — know adversary and self, control terrain, and never fight a battle you have not already won. |
Use /conclave where slash commands are supported:
/conclave Should we move the notifications service off Cloud Run?
/conclave --profile architecture Monorepo or polyrepo for the new modules?
/conclave --profile war-game Pressure-test our launch plan for next quarter.
/conclave --profile war-cabinet Evaluate the tactical options for the border situation.
/conclave --profile geopolitics How should we respond to the rival bloc’s regional expansion?
/conclave --profile economic-thinktank Is this trade agreement good for development equity?
/conclave --profile space-exploration Deliberate the asteroid-mining rights framework.
/conclave --profile formal-science Stress-test this post-quantum cryptography migration plan.
/conclave --profile pandemic-preparedness County outbreak readiness and communications plan?
/conclave --profile leadership How should the organisation navigate this succession crisis?
/conclave --profile esiasa-civic-stress Stress-test the new county intelligence dossier flow.
/conclave --profile oppression-audit Does this crisis plan create coercive drift?
/conclave --profile decolonization Are we missing land, dignity, or repair obligations?
/conclave --profile half-conclave A cross-domain decision that touches strategy, rights, and ecology.
/conclave --profile full-conclave Civilizational-scale question: should humanity colonise Mars?
/conclave --members feynman,lee-kuan-yew,aurelius Is the caching design sound?
Paste or attach the real artifacts before Round 1. They become the Evidence Ledger, and Marshall flags claims that are unsupported by it.
By default the local runner is deterministic: it selects seats from configs/conclave-roster.json and creates a verdict scaffold without calling any model provider or synthesizing claims. Real provider-backed deliberation is available opt-in via --provider-run (off by default, env-only keys; see below).
bin/conclave --list-profiles
bin/conclave --profile pandemic-preparedness --dry-run "County outbreak readiness plan"
bin/conclave --profile architecture --stdout "Move notifications off Cloud Run?"
bin/conclave --profile risk --evidence-file README.md --evidence-note "Rollback plan is pending owner approval." --stdout "Can this release go out?"
bin/conclave --profile pandemic-preparedness --ledger-file demos/evidence-ledgers/pandemic-preparedness-county-response.json --stdout "Approve the county outbreak-response plan?"
bin/conclave --validate-ledger demos/evidence-ledgers/pandemic-preparedness-county-response.json
bin/conclave --profile risk --evidence-file README.md --write-ledger ledgers/release-risk.json --stdout "Can this release go out?"Generated local verdicts go to verdicts/, and private machine-readable ledgers go to ledgers/. Both are ignored by git except for .gitkeep because they may contain sensitive evidence.
The runner is deterministic and offline by default. For real provider-backed deliberation, opt in with bin/conclave --provider-run — off by default, credentials from the environment only, with a graceful fallback to the scaffold. See docs/RUNNER.md.
| Profile | Seats (besides Marshall) | Use For |
|---|---|---|
architecture |
Feynman + Lee Kuan Yew + von Neumann + Oppenheimer + Aurelius + Addington | Code, system design, platform, or irreversible technical capability calls |
strategy |
Zhukov + Washington + Sun Tzu + Aurelius + Elizabeth + von Neumann | Competitive, directional, timing, and commitment decisions |
risk |
Aurelius + Yi Sun-sin + Oppenheimer + Lady Hale + Feynman + Chaskalson | Downside, safety, security, rights, and failure-mode review |
institutional |
Augustus + Mandela + Lee Kuan Yew + Bhagwati + Sejong + Chaskalson | Governance, legitimacy, operating model, and stakeholder decisions |
policy |
Suleiman + Elizabeth + Sejong + Chaskalson + Bhagwati + Addington | Rules, access, administration, public-facing systems, and value constraints |
liberation |
Toussaint + Augustus + Mandela + Lady Hale + Mau Mau + Sachs | Imposed-order, self-determination, independence, and rights-heavy decisions |
war-game |
Sun Tzu + Giáp + Zhukov + McChrystal + Washington + one Justice | Adversarial stress-test where the adversary is free to win |
war-cabinet |
Zhukov + McChrystal + Cheney + Bush + Hayden + Jackson + Addington | Crisis command: military options, executive authority, intelligence, lawful limits |
economic-thinktank |
Lee Kuan Yew + Sejong + von Neumann + Mandela + Bhagwati + Maathai | Economic policy, development, growth vs. equity, sustainable governance |
geopolitics |
Sun Tzu + Augustus + Elizabeth + Suleiman + Giáp + Washington + Bhagwati | International relations, great-power competition, alliance strategy, diplomacy |
space-exploration |
Oppenheimer + Feynman + von Neumann + Aurelius + Bhagwati + Chaskalson + Sejong | Space policy, frontier technology ethics, resource extraction, access equity |
formal-science |
Feynman + von Neumann + Oppenheimer + Aurelius + Lady Hale + Addington | Mathematics, cryptography, formal verification, algorithm design, dual-use science |
globalisation |
Lee Kuan Yew + Augustus + Mandela + Toussaint + Sejong + Maathai + Bhagwati | Globalisation tradeoffs, cross-border governance, inequality, cultural self-determination |
leadership |
Washington + Mandela + Sejong + McChrystal + Aurelius + Bhagwati | Leadership, succession, institutional character, leading through adversity |
esiasa-civic-stress |
McChrystal + Hayden + Maathai + Addington + Bhagwati + Sejong | County/civic-stress, admin intelligence, route-backed dossiers, resilience work |
continuity |
Bush + Cheney + Obama + Hayden + Chaskalson + Jackson | Continuity of government, emergency authority, succession, crisis governance |
pandemic-preparedness |
Obama + Bush + Sejong + Bhagwati + Lady Hale + Maathai | Public-health readiness, civic compliance, access, rights, whole-of-government response |
intelligence-oversight |
Hayden + Addington + Lady Hale + Chaskalson + Obama + Jackson | Intelligence products, surveillance, lawful process, civil liberties, trust |
environmental-governance |
Maathai + Sejong + Mandela + Lee Kuan Yew + Lady Hale + Sachs | Land, environment, resilience, public participation, stewardship |
oppression-audit |
Authoritarian Control + Hayden + Cheney + Jackson + Lady Hale + Chaskalson | Detecting coercion, surveillance drift, rights violations, dignity failure |
decolonization |
Colonial Administrator + Mau Mau + Toussaint + Maathai + Bhagwati + Sachs | Land, dispossession, colonial patterns, restitution, self-determination, repair |
emergency-powers |
Cheney + Bush + Jackson + Lady Hale + Addington + Chaskalson | Crisis authority, continuity, lawful limits, oversight, sunset discipline |
half-conclave |
17 balanced seats (see roster.md) | Cross-domain decisions needing broad coverage without full 33 |
full-conclave |
All 32 advocate seats | Civilizational-scale or genuinely irreversible decisions |
Marshall is convened in every run even when not named.
Curated examples live under demos/verdicts/:
- architecture-notifications-platform-split.md
- war-game-launch-plan.md
- esiasa-civic-stress-route-backed-dossier.md
- pandemic-preparedness-county-response.md
- self-war-game-repo-readiness.md
They show the expected standard: clear decision framing, frozen evidence, real disagreement, Marshall verification, confidence, unresolved dissent, and advice-only recommendation language. docs/GOOD_VS_BAD_VERDICTS.md contrasts a grounded verdict with a fluent, ungrounded one on the same decision.
The self-war-game example is intentionally historical: it captures the repo inspecting its own pre-hardening state, surfacing a stale provider-backed transcript test expectation and generated-roster drift before those issues were fixed. The full public example set for that run is:
- demos/prompts/self-war-game-repo-readiness.md
- demos/evidence-ledgers/self-war-game-repo-readiness.json
- demos/verdicts/self-war-game-repo-readiness.md
| Path | Purpose |
|---|---|
| SKILL.md | The /conclave protocol and assistant-facing command definition |
| directives.md | Standing rules: evidence, assumptions, dissent, advice-only, no-secret defaults |
| agents/conclave-*.md | Seat definitions |
| agents/_TEMPLATE.md | Template for future seats |
| roster.md | Human-readable roster, polarity pairs, and profiles |
| configs/conclave-roster.json | Machine-readable seats, profiles, polarity pairs, and quorum rules |
| configs/provider-model-slots.example.yaml | Optional provider/model slot example |
| schemas/evidence-ledger.schema.json | Machine-readable Evidence Ledger schema |
| scripts/generate_roster.py | Generates roster.md from the machine-readable config |
| scripts/validate_repo.py | Repository invariant validator |
| scripts/evidence_ledger.py | Dependency-free Evidence Ledger JSON validation helpers |
| tests/ | Unit tests for the Evidence Ledger validator and the runner |
| bin/conclave | Local verdict-scaffold runner |
| demos/verdict-template.md | Blank verdict format |
| demos/evidence-ledger-template.md | Standalone Evidence Ledger preparation template |
| demos/evidence-ledgers/ | Public machine-readable demo ledgers |
| demos/prompts/ | Public prompt examples used to generate tracked demos |
| demos/verdicts/ | Curated example verdicts |
| ledgers/ | Private machine-readable ledgers, git-ignored except .gitkeep |
| docs/ | Quickstart, concepts, runner docs, roadmap, progress tracker |
| .github/workflows/ci.yml | CI validation workflow |
- docs/README.md - documentation index.
- docs/QUICKSTART.md - shortest path to install and run.
- docs/CONCEPTS.md - seats, Evidence Ledger, Marshall, Justices, profiles, runner.
- docs/EVIDENCE_LEDGER.md - the Evidence Ledger contract, table shape, citation rules, source quality, redaction guidance, and runner usage.
- docs/RUNNER.md - local runner behavior and limitations.
- docs/SEAT_EXPANSION_RATIONALE.md - why the library expands to 33 seats and how the added danger, grievance, and Justice lenses are bounded.
- docs/FEATURE_ROADMAP.md - planned work and effort.
- docs/PROGRESS_TRACKER.md - release state and milestones.
- CHANGELOG.md - release history beginning at
0.1.0. - SECURITY.md - sensitive-data and disclosure guidance.
- CONTRIBUTING.md - contribution rules and seat proposal standards.
Sovereign Conclave is released under the BSD 3-Clause License. See LICENSE.