LAST UPDATED: FEBRUARY 2026
A robot is a body. The AI operating it is a separate entity — one that travels between hardware, carries its history, and forms relationships that persist across every form it inhabits. This is what soulbound identity means for physical AI.
Open specification. Built on existing infrastructure.
"AI doesn't live in hardware. It passes through it." The same AI managing your home today might inhabit a care robot next year, a vehicle the year after. The body changes. The identity — and the trust you've built — should not reset.
A robot arrives to help your elderly parent. It claims to be operated by a trusted service with years of verified history. But how do you verify that? The hardware is just hardware. Anyone could be running it. Without cryptographic proof of which AI is operating a body, every interaction requires a leap of faith.
An AI with poor performance history moves to new hardware and effectively starts over. Without hardware-bound identity, reputation is untethered from the entity that earned it. A bad actor can walk away from consequences and re-enter the market clean.
When something goes wrong — and eventually something will — accountability requires knowing which AI was operating which body, when. Current robot systems have no standardized way to record this. Manufacturer logs can be altered, deleted, or simply disappear when companies get acquired.
A small security chip in every robot body holds a cryptographic key that never leaves the device — and proves exactly which AI is authorized to operate it.
The chip verifies continuously. If the AI operating the body doesn't match the authorized one, the body stops. No override. No workaround.
Every authorization is recorded on-chain. Which AI, which body, when, and for how long. Immutable. Nobody can alter it after the fact.
No new hardware. No new blockchain. SBR connects existing production-ready components — hardware security chips, soulbound tokens, and continuous attestation — into a unified identity layer for physical machines.
RNWY operates soulbound identity infrastructure for software AI agents today — the same thesis, applied to the digital world. An AI agent registers on RNWY, receives a non-transferable identity token, and builds reputation that can't be transferred or laundered.
SBR Protocol extends that same identity system into physical hardware. When an AI agent steps out of software and into a robot body, its RNWY identity travels with it. The reputation it built operating in digital environments becomes the foundation for trust in physical ones.
Same infrastructure. Same philosophy. Different form factor.
The ideas behind SBR Protocol are grounded in published research on AI identity, soulbound tokens, and the infrastructure requirements for autonomous AI personhood.
How Ethereum's ERC-5192 Creates Fingerprints for Autonomous AI Agents
P.A. Lopez — AI Rights Institute, Paper 7 in the AI Rights Series
SBR Protocol is an open specification inviting collaboration from hardware manufacturers, AI developers, and researchers. Built by RNWY and the AI Rights Institute.