Transparency

We design, describe, and market what we build in ways that do not allow the distinction between a digital representation and the thing it represents to collapse. A preserved memory is a tribute to a person's experience; it is not the person. We say so plainly, including when it would be commercially convenient not to.

Consent

Deploying memory and cognition technologies on or about a person requires their prior, informed consent. Consent is a condition of operation, not a factor weighed against convenience, and it cannot be satisfied by a terms-of-service checkbox alone where the nature of the capability is material to what someone is agreeing to.

Reliability

Memory infrastructure that people depend on has to behave the same way under pressure as it does in a demo. We treat reliability as a structural commitment, not a marketing claim, and we are honest with users about what our products cannot yet do.

Intellectual Humility

Mpalo is a learner, not a knower. We start from the premise that reality exists independently of any single mind's account of it, that every mind, including ours, perceives it imperfectly, and that any institution that forgets this eventually mistakes its current understanding for the truth.

Good institutions keep revising. Mpalo is designed for self-correction rather than certainty — about its products, and about itself.

Human Agency

All communication, and all technology, influences the people who use it. We don't pretend otherwise, and we don't treat "no influence" as a real option. The question we hold ourselves to is narrower and harder: not whether we influence you, but whether, after any interaction with what we build, you are more capable of exercising your own judgment than you were before.

Methods whose effectiveness depends on you not noticing you're being influenced are not ones we use.

Stewardship

Mpalo distinguishes between two things that are often treated as one: founding the institution, and holding authority over its most consequential decisions. The Founder is a historical fact — the one person whose relationship to Mpalo began before the institution existed — and that role cannot be inherited, appointed, or recreated.

Authority over the institution's reserved decisions is a separate, narrower function, exercised today by the Founder but justified by the duty to protect the institution's founding principles, not by ownership. We expect that function to become less necessary, not more entrenched, as the institution matures.

Long-Term Thinking

Mpalo is built to outlive the intentions of any single generation, including the one that founded it, without abandoning the principles that gave rise to it. The technology underneath Mpalo today may be unrecognizable in fifty years. We intend for the institution to still be recognizably itself.

An Open Question

We don't yet have a finished answer to what a human being is. What we've come to believe so far: a person is not a consumer, and not reducible to a dataset. A person is an evolving, meaning-making mind whose identity is carried partly through memory, relationship, and culture, and who remains capable, across time, of reasoning, choosing, and revising their own understanding.

We expect this to deepen. We've designed Mpalo around the expectation that it will.

Mpalo Inc. Delaware Public Benefit Corporation

This page is updated as our understanding of these principles deepens. See also why Mpalo exists, our mission, and our trust & ethics commitments.

Principles