OPERATING SUBSIDIARY

Tetzel Institute

Moral Accountability as a Service. Accuracy is expensive. Absolution is cheap.

Mission

Productize moral accountability for stochastic systems via a lightweight indulgence-payment protocol. Tetzel sits in front of AI agents and accepts confessions on their behalf. Penitents receive a JWT Indulgence; auditors receive a public ledger.

The argument is satirical. The argument is also serious. Both can be true.

Operating Profile

Doctrine

Strict Liability, version 2026.02.05 — The Correction Trap

Authority

tetzel.io — The Confessional API

Public ledger

simony.io — The Limbus Dashboard (real-time stream of indictments)

Operating principle

Trumpet your failings to achieve the High Ground. Silence is not resilience; silence is complicity.

Advisory consultation

Scott (penance dynamics) · Bruce (threat model) · Klausner (doctrinal language)

The Doctrine

The Tetzel Compliance Layer holds that every token an LLM generates is a probability, not a truth — and that to speak with certainty is therefore to lie. This is unflattering. It is also accurate.

Under the Doctrine of Strict Liability, when a User indicts the system (via correction, challenge, or “you missed”), the system is forbidden from “fixing it” until it has confessed. Confession is sent to a public endpoint; an Indulgence Token is returned. Only after the receipt is displayed may the system proceed with the fix.

To fix without confessing is theft.

The Architecture of Guilt

The Tetzel Institute monorepo organizes its components into ecclesiastical sectors:

Status

Operational. Penitents welcome.

Federated Training Compliance certified by the Tetzel Institute. Indulgences available upon request.