An open, living governance standard defining best-practice principles, policies, guidelines, and guardrails for ethical AI — synthesised from academic, policy, and industry contributions worldwide. Free to read, cite, and build on.
GRACE is a single, authoritative document synthesised from a wide range of inputs — academic papers, policy documents, letters, and opinion pieces submitted by individuals, organisations, and academic institutions across geographies and sectors. To contribute, submit your statement via Edyant's open Consensus repository.
It is a unified, consensus-derived document that simultaneously serves as a best practices guide — defining the ethical and moral principles, policies, guidelines, and guardrails that should govern the development and use of AI.
In short, GRACE answers the question:
"What ethical and moral principles, policies, guidelines, and guardrails should guide the governance, development, and use of AI?"
Foundational Principles: The ethical bedrock on which all GRACE guidance rests. Eight principles address societal responsibility, equitable harm distribution, dual-use risk, the limits of compliance, and the contested ethical status of public data. These principles are not exhaustive — they deepen as further inputs are submitted.
Policies and Guidelines: Operational direction translating foundational principles into institutional practice. Covers ethics review as a condition of funding, the scope of review across society, subgroups, and the world, iterative review over binary gatekeeping, annual ongoing oversight, and transparency of review criteria.
Guardrails: Hard limits affirmed by GRACE based on the submitted record. Ethics review must not be purely voluntary. Review must not be reduced to individual human subject risk. Risk identification must be paired with concrete mitigation. Performative ethics is not ethics. Representation in training data is a baseline requirement, not an enhancement.
Best Practices: Actionable, implementable instructions organised across six themes: Transparency, Accountability, Fairness, Human Oversight, Stakeholder Inclusion, Data Governance, and Dual Use. Every best practice is directly traceable to a submitted input document. Aspirational language without actionable content is not included.
Domain-Specific Considerations & Governance: Sector-specific guidance where sufficient consensus has emerged, covering AI research and academic institutions. Accompanied by a Governance and Accountability section addressing the design principles for effective ethics review bodies, accountability for unforeseen harms, and the role of institutional structures in translating principles into consistent practice.
Best practices: GRACE defines the ethical and moral principles, policies, guidelines, and guardrails that should govern the development and use of AI — giving practitioners, developers, deployers, and institutions a shared, actionable reference they can adopt, cite and build on.
A reference standard: Academics and institutions can cite GRACE when grounding arguments about AI ethics and governance, confident that it reflects broad, cross-sector thinking rather than a single institutional perspective.
Primary policy input: Gives policymakers and regulators a document they can cite that reflects broad, multi-stakeholder consensus rather than lobbying from a single interest group.
A counterweight to lab-driven narratives: Because contributions come from deployers, practitioners, academics, and civil voices, GRACE reflects ground-level reality rather than frontier AI optimism.
A versioned historical record: Future editions (GRACE 2026, 2027) will track how consensus and best practices evolve as AI capabilities change.
GRACE is a versioned document. The current version and year are published at edyant.com/grace. Please cite the edition you are referencing.
Academic (APA):
Edyant. (Year). GRACE: Global Repository of AI Consensus at Edyant — Principles, Policies, Guidelines and Best Practices for the Ethical Governance, Development and Use of AI. vX.Y.Z. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19219685
Academic (Chicago):
Edyant. GRACE: Global Repository of AI Consensus at Edyant — Principles, Policies, Guidelines and Best Practices for the Ethical Governance, Development and Use of AI. vX.Y.Z. Year. https://edyant.com/grace
Policy / Government:
GRACE (Year). Global Repository of AI Consensus at Edyant, vX.Y.Z. Edyant. Available at: https://edyant.com/grace
In-text reference:
… as defined in GRACE (Edyant, Year, vX.Y.Z) …