What is Attested Actions, in one sentence?+
The envelope layer for agent actions: it composes an action's records — a receipt that it happened, a permit and grant that it was authorized — into one signed, per-agent hash-chained document (Ed25519 + JCS) that verifies end to end, offline.
What is the Attested Action Envelope?+
The atomic object: a signed record carrying agent_id, action (verb/resource/params), policy_id, outcome (authorized/denied/conditional), prev_hash, issued_at, pubkey, and sig. It binds an action to its authorization and chains to the agent's prior envelope by hash, so the authorization history is tamper-evident. Reference implementation: sm-aae.
What are the two claims?+
(a) It happened — bound to receipts (sm-arp). (b) It was authorized — bound to permits and grants (sm-aae, sm-dat). Those two, bound into one verifiable envelope, are what "attested" means.
What about corroborating the subject — was the counterparty who they claimed to be?+
That is a companion concern, not one of the envelope's two claims. Establishing whether a subject was truthful, by asking multiple independent sources the same question, is handled by the corroboration layer — the quilt — with sm-resolver and sm-divergence as its reference implementations and draft-chandra-agent-registry-corroboration as its Internet-Draft. It consumes attested actions; it is kept deliberately separate from the envelope.
Does Attested Actions tell me if an action was the right thing to do?+
No. Whether an action was correct or wise is explicitly out of scope. Attested Actions is not a policy engine and does not judge semantics — only that an action happened and was authorized.
Is Attested Actions a competitor to NANDA?+
No — complementary. NANDA's Index and AgentFacts make an agent discoverable and identifiable; Attested Actions is the accountability layer that makes what a discovered agent does verifiable. Two halves of the same stack: discovery resolves the agent, attestation holds its actions to account. Neither does the other's job.
What is the sm-* stack?+
The open Stellarminds reference implementations (sm = Stellarminds), published at github.com/Sharathvc23: the envelope primitives (sm-arp, sm-aae, sm-dat), the surfaces (sm-attest-viewer, sm-decision-inspector, sm-attest-auditor), the foundation (sm-conformance), and the companion corroboration layer (sm-resolver, sm-divergence). See Primitives for each library's role.
Is this open source / an open standard?+
The sm-* reference implementations are open and published at github.com/Sharathvc23. The work is developed in the open alongside Internet-Drafts and papers from the research house Stellarminds.ai.