An unsigned preference file is a note on the door. Anyone can replace it, and nobody can tell.
AIFeed turns the note into a claim that travels with evidence. The manifest is canonicalized with JCS, signed with Ed25519, and pinned to the domain through a DNS record. An agent that verifies the chain knows three things at once: who said it, for which domain, and whether the statement is still current.
That matters for the boring cases first. When a crawler sees training: deny, the question is not what the file says but whether it was forged.
The same machinery makes revocation real. A permission that cannot be withdrawn is not a permission, it is a hope. Status documents are signed by governance keys, checked on use, and bounded in staleness so silence is treated as unknown rather than approval.
AIFeed Protocol ContributorsReference implementation and specifications