Frequently Asked Questions
What is AIPC?
AIPC (AI Presentation Contract) is an open protocol that lets data providers attach machine-readable presentation rules to their API responses. These rules tell AI agents how to format, disclose, and attribute data — ensuring compliance regardless of which AI system presents the information.
Why can't the AI just read the documentation?
Today's AI agents do not reliably read, interpret, and enforce complex compliance rules from human-written documentation. Even when they do, there is no way to verify compliance at runtime. AIPC makes the rules machine-executable so the runtime can enforce them deterministically, not probabilistically.
Does AIPC replace my existing API?
No. AIPC wraps your existing response in a contract envelope. Your payload remains unchanged. You can support both standard and AIPC-formatted responses from the same endpoint using content negotiation (e.g., Accept: application/aipc+json).
What happens if the AI ignores the contract?
The contract is enforced at the runtime level, not by the AI model itself. The runtime validates the response, formats the data, and generates prompt instructions. If a required rule cannot be satisfied, the runtime applies the fail_behavior (usually suppress). The AI model receives pre-processed data and instructions — it does not need to interpret the contract directly.
Is AIPC only for financial data?
No. While financial services are a compelling first use case because of heavy regulation, AIPC works for any domain where data has presentation rules: healthcare, real estate, insurance, legal, e-commerce, government data, and more.
How does AIPC handle multiple providers in one response?
In v0.1, each AIPC response comes from a single provider. Multi-provider composition (merging data from multiple AIPC sources into a single presentation) is planned for v0.3. In the meantime, runtimes should process each provider's response independently and present them as separate sections.
What is a compliance level?
AIPC compliance operates on two independent axes:
- Provider Contract Levels (what the contract requires): L1 Basic (disclosures, display rules, attribution), L2 Standard (+ freshness, tone, conditionals), L3 Full (+ modality overrides, signed contracts, field-level suppression).
- Consumer Enforcement Levels (what the runtime enforces): L1 Prompt-Only (LLM instruction-following only), L2 Deterministic Rendering (compliance blocks rendered by code), L3 Full Enforcement (+ post-generation narrative validation).
Providers can set a minimum_consumer_enforcement level to require deterministic rendering or full enforcement. See Compliance Levels for the full matrix.
Can I use AIPC with voice assistants?
Yes. The runtime accepts a modality parameter (visual, voice, or document). Contracts can include modality-specific overrides — for example, shorter attribution text for voice or different placement rules for documents.
Is AIPC open source?
Yes. The specification, reference runtime, and all tooling are open source under the MIT license. We encourage contributions from data providers, AI platforms, and the broader developer community.
How do I get started?
Start with the Quickstart guide. In five minutes you will have a validated AIPC contract generating prompt instructions. Then explore the Core Concepts to understand each piece in depth.