What the bureau does.

SkillAuthor is an independent registration bureau for .mdc skill manifests — the small, composable instruction files that increasingly govern how AI agents and tools behave. We exist for one reason: to make it provable who created a particular skill, and when.

What a registration is

A SkillAuthor registration is a permanent, public record consisting of: the exact bytes of your .mdc file, the SHA-256 fingerprint of those bytes, the moment of receipt (UTC, ISO 8601), and the name and email you supplied as the author. The record is sealed with a sequential registration number of the form SA-YYYY-NNNNNN, issued only when payment is confirmed and never re-used.

What a registration is not

A registration is not a grant of copyright, a patent, or a trademark. Copyright in your skill arises automatically in most jurisdictions when you fix it in tangible form. We provide something orthogonal but useful: independent, cryptographic evidence that a specific file existed at a specific time and that you claimed it. In disputes — and they will come — that evidence is what tilts the scale.

Why bytes, not ideas

We verify bytes, not originality of ideas. Two authors can independently arrive at very similar prompts; the bureau does not adjudicate that. What we do guarantee is that the file you submitted is the file we recorded, that it was received at the moment we say it was, and that anyone in the world can confirm both facts with a single command on their own machine.