PORTEND LABS / RESEARCH

Ideas for intelligence in an increasingly autonomous world.

Original frameworks, essays and research into the systems that sit between knowledge, decisions, software and action.

RESEARCH / 01—03
01FEATURED RESEARCH

SIGNATURE FRAMEWORK / PREPRINT

The Authority
Resolution Framework.

Your ontology can be perfectly correct and still get authority wrong.

ARF proposes a five-domain ontology for resolving who — and what — actually has the right to decide when an agent moves from understanding to action.

Parviz Shariff · 2026Read the research →

THE ARCHIVE

Research, in progress.

Ideas become frameworks, frameworks become systems.

02

PRACTITIONER ESSAY

Your AI Agent Doesn’t Know Who Really Runs Your Pricing Desk

A practical argument for treating authority as a first-class part of the enterprise context an autonomous agent must resolve.

Field note · Agentic governance
03

ONTOLOGY ESSAY

Your ontology can be perfectly correct and still get authority wrong

Meaning and the right to act are related, but they are not the same problem. ARF begins where semantic correctness stops.

Research note · Ontology & authority
A WORKING PRINCIPLE

We are less interested in predicting the future than in building the conceptual infrastructure needed to navigate it.

Explore the Lab ↗