Chapter 11: The GABA Standard

The GABA Standard

Source: crcstandard.org (nav bar link to gabastandard.com; Pillar 04 "Boundary" scoring criteria, live-fetched). gabastandard.com itself has not yet been fetched or reviewed — this chapter is deliberately thin rather than speculative, and should be substantially rewritten once that site is reviewed directly.

GABA is referenced as its own standard, at its own domain (gabastandard.com), and cross-linked from CRC's own site navigation — meaning it's a sibling standard to CRC, not a CRC sub-component, even though the two are clearly designed to interlock.

What's confirmed so far

GABA's role is named precisely at one specific point in the CRC framework: Pillar 04 (Boundary)'s top scoring tier, "Attested." The distinction between "Hardened" (tier 3 — cert-pinned endpoints, request signing, anomaly detection, circuit breakers) and "Attested" (tier 4, the maximum) is specifically that GABA attestation is complete for every endpoint, residual risks are formally documented and signed by an authorized signatory, and — the detail that most sharply defines GABA's scope — computer-use AI agents require explicit GABA attestation separate from inference-only endpoints.

That last point is the clearest signal available about what GABA actually governs: it is not a general AI-safety attestation scheme, but one specifically concerned with the distinction between an AI system that merely returns text (inference-only) and one that can take actions in a computer-use capacity. An inference endpoint and a computer-use agent hitting the same governed boundary are treated as categorically different risks under this framework, and GABA attestation is the mechanism for the latter, more consequential category.

GABA certs are also the artifact referenced on chandrahub.net (Chapter 10) as printing the chandrahub.net URL for examiner verification — meaning GABA attestation and chandrahub's examiner-facing role are meant to work together, though the precise mechanics of that handoff (what a GABA cert actually contains, how an examiner verifies one against a CU chain) have not been sourced directly yet.

What this chapter does not yet cover

• GABA's full scoring criteria or certification process (unlike CRC's 0–16 scale, no equivalent structure has been reviewed for GABA)
• Whether GABA is MIT-licensed like CRC and Chandra Protocol, or has different terms
• The acronym's expansion — "GABA" has not been spelled out in anything reviewed so far
• AegisGenera's likely role as GABA's technical enforcement layer (Chapter 19 flags this as a reasonable inference from CRC's own Pillar 04 description, but it is explicitly unconfirmed against AegisGenera's own source, which doesn't exist yet)

This chapter should be rewritten from gabastandard.com directly before it's treated as more than a placeholder.