Soma
The standard of care for AI decisions

A machine can make the decision. It cannot assume the duty that comes with it.

Soma is the standard of care that artificial intelligence owes the people it decides for — especially under pressure to perform on speed, cost, and scale, where even sound decisions can drift from the person they land on. Published in the open, free to read and use — a framework to adapt, not a service to subscribe to.

Half-day workshops where your people write their own standard of care — together.

What Soma gives you

A calm, practical way to put real care into the decisions your AI makes — and to show, plainly, that you did.

Sync across teams

Your brand, product, and data teams finally describe what your AI owes people in the same words — one room, instead of meetings going in circles.

Trust with the people you serve

Be the company whose customers know they're treated fairly — even by the algorithm. Where you're judged on how people feel, that trust is the real prize.

Lead your industry

Be among the first to hold a real standard of care for your AI. The edge is reputation and leadership — not procurement leverage or box-ticking.

Visible integrity

Doing right by the people you serve, and being seen to. The quiet credibility of acting before anyone forced you to.

01The reason

AI now makes decisions that once owed people a fair hearing.

Who gets hired, lent to, flagged, or seen — choices that always carried a duty of care now run through machines that feel none. Soma exists so that duty isn't lost in the handover. The founding note sets it out in full.

Founding note · 2026

You automated the decision. You did not automate away the duty of care.

The cornerstoneRead →
02The claim

A machine can take over the decision. It cannot take over the duty of care that came with it.

Long before machines, anyone whose work could alter a life was held to a standard of care — attention, competence, honesty owed to the one with the least power in the exchange.

When the deciding moves to a model that screens, scores, ranks, or flags, that duty does not stay behind. It travels with the decision — and too often lands on no one. Soma names where it lands, and what it asks.

03The Standard — four duties a system inherits

Read the full Standard →

i

Competence

First, do no harm

The decision must meet a real standard — sound, current, fit for the person it concerns — not merely whatever the model returned. A system that decides worse than a careful person is a hazard that was chosen.

ii

Candor

Informed consent

The person has a right to know a machine decided, and to understand the grounds in terms they can act on. "Proprietary" is not an answer one is owed. Care that hides itself is not care.

iii

Recourse

The second opinion

Every automated decision needs a door back to a human with the authority to look again, and to overturn. A decision no one can revisit has not been governed — only imposed.

iv

Non-abandonment

Continuity of care

One does not deploy and walk away. The duty continues for as long as the system decides — watching for the person it begins to harm, and reaching them before the harm compounds.

"We will not be liable" and "they are alright because of us" are different sentences. Soma is built on the second.

If the idea stirred you, write your thoughts.

Soma is a standard for our new shared reality.

Read it, cite it, disagree with it — carry it into your own corner of the world. And if you'd like to bring it into your teams, to write your own standard of care together, that's what the workshops are for.

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