DCP-02 — Intent Declaration & Policy Gating

No silent actions. An agent declares what it intends to do before doing it; a policy layer decides whether to approve, escalate, or block. DCP-02 defines the declared intent and the policy decision.

Normative artifacts

Artifact	Description	Schema
Intent	Declaration of intent: agent, human, action, channel, data classes, estimated impact.	schemas/v1/intent.schema.json
PolicyDecision	Decision on an intent: approve / escalate / block, risk score, reasons. Optional: require human confirmation.	schemas/v1/policy_decision.schema.json
HumanConfirmation	(Optional) Explicit human confirmation on an intent: approve or deny.	schemas/v1/human_confirmation.schema.json

$id for schemas: https://dcp-ai.org/schemas/v1/<name>.schema.json

Validation

Validate an object against its schema:

dcp validate schemas/v1/intent.schema.json <intent.json>
dcp validate schemas/v1/policy_decision.schema.json <policy_decision.json>
dcp validate schemas/v1/human_confirmation.schema.json <human_confirmation.json>

A Citizenship Bundle includes Intent and PolicyDecision; validate it with:

dcp validate-bundle <citizenship_bundle.json>

Examples

• tests/conformance/examples/intent.json
• tests/conformance/examples/policy_decision.json
• tests/conformance/examples/human_confirmation.json

The source of truth for fields and enums is the JSON Schema; this document is the normative specification that references them.

Implementation notes (informative)

Added 25/10/2026. Not normative. These notes add no requirement and change nothing above: they describe how the reference code on main relates to this text. Where they differ, the normative text above stands.

• This document and its commands describe the V1 artifacts (schemas/v1/). The V2 counterparts (schemas/v2/intent.schema.json, policy_decision.schema.json, human_confirmation.schema.json) add, among others, session_nonce and requires_consent to the intent, and session_nonce, applied_policy_hash, required_confirmation and timestamp to the policy decision; they are specified in DCP-AI v2.0.
• <intent.json> and the other names in angle brackets are placeholders for your own files.
• A policy decision is a record of what a policy layer decided. Verifying a bundle checks that it is consistent and signed; it does not enforce the decision, and the reference verifiers do not refuse a bundle because its decision is block. Enforcing it before the action is the application's job.