The Axiom Foundation launches to publish the world's rules as open, verifiable code

Computable law for all: statutes and regulations as cited, time-aware, executable code — starting with tax and benefit policy

NEW YORK — July 28, 2026 — The rules that decide who gets food assistance, health coverage, and tax credits live in closed code that no one can check. Today, the Axiom Foundation launches to publish them in the open: cited, computable, and verified — one open, cited source for what the rules actually say, that any tool can build on.

The laws that govern daily life — who qualifies for SNAP, how a tax credit is computed, what a benefit pays — are written in prose. Every calculator, eligibility system, and policy tool that needs them translates the law from that prose into something a machine can run. Most do it from scratch, differently, and out of public view. The interpretation lives in closed code: hard to verify, harder to fix, duplicated everywhere.

The Axiom Foundation publishes the open, verifiable layer underneath: open, machine-readable encodings of the world’s rules, starting with tax and benefit policy — statutes, regulations, and policy rules turned into cited, time-aware, executable code that anyone can run, audit, or reform.

The Axiom Foundation’s AI-driven pipeline reads a statute, encodes it section by section, and verifies encodings before shipping: every value cites a statute, every clause carries an effective date, and every available encoding is cross-checked against external engines and datasets, including PolicyEngine and TAXSIM. The result is one cited, checkable source for what a rule actually computes.

“The rule of law begins with access to the law. That’s why societies publish it — proclaimed in the square, printed in statute books, posted on websites. Our era’s medium is software, and for six years at PolicyEngine I’ve published tax and benefit law as open code. The limit was human bandwidth, and AI just broke it. So we built the Axiom Foundation to publish the law as code anyone can read, run, and verify — from taxes and benefits to the rest of the world’s rules.” — Max Ghenis, CEO and Founder, the Axiom Foundation

“I’ve spent my career inside and alongside government closing the gap between the policy we pass and the services people actually receive — including building benefits access tools and some of the earliest rules as code work in the U.S. AI has changed what’s possible and rules as code can now happen at the scale of the law itself. That’s what the Axiom Foundation makes real — an open digital layer between policy and delivery, so no one is guessing at what the law says, and government, builders, and AI models all work from the same playbook.” — Ariel Kennan, President, the Axiom Foundation

Why now. Two pressures converged. Governments and the organizations serving residents are carrying the growing cost of duplicative, opaque rule implementations — every major law, like the 2025 US budget law’s Medicaid and SNAP changes or a UK Universal Credit rule change, forces every system to re-interpret the same text separately. And AI can finally read statute and encode it at scale — while AI systems answer policy and eligibility questions millions of times a day with no ground truth to stand on. The tool that makes the law encodable is the same tool that makes encoding it urgent. The enabling pieces — six years of tax-and-benefit modeling infrastructure, an AI-enabled encoder pipeline, cross-engine verification — only recently exist together.

What this makes possible. An AI assistant that computes what a family qualifies for from the statute and shows its work, instead of guessing. A caseworker, a county, and a two-person startup building on the same verified encodings instead of each re-implementing the law privately. A lawmaker who knows, to the dollar, what a bill does to a family of four before the vote — and can check afterward that the systems delivered what passed. And a citable, executable corpus of the law that researchers can test, extend, and challenge.

“Unnecessary administrative burdens limit the reach of the safety net. Tools like Axiom are part of the solution, using technology and data in a way that helps both clients and caseworkers. The focus on both responsiveness and transparency offers a glimpse of what a modern safety net could look like.” — Donald Moynihan, professor of public policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Co-Director of the Better Government Lab

“Transforming the United States’ public benefits system, so everyone can get the support they need to achieve financial security, will require fundamentally new technology infrastructure. The Axiom Foundation is building a critical layer of that infrastructure, one our research has found missing in many past efforts to create an automated, dignified benefits experience. This is exactly the kind of big swing we need to take as a field if we’re going to build the better system every American deserves.” — Tim Shaw, Director of the Benefits Transformation Initiative, Aspen Institute Financial Security Program

What launches today. Over 3,000 provisions of law encoded to the Axiom Foundation’s new RuleSpec standard. The Axiom App to explore the law through the computation graph. Developer tools to build products on the platform by compiling the executable rules to Rust or WASM. And the Axiom Foundation’s gallery of early examples of what an open rules layer makes possible — a chatbot answering policy questions with citations, a workflow checker, benefits cliffs explorer, and microsimulation at scale.

Coming soon. The Axiom Foundation is encoding more policies daily — US and internationally, active and proposed — and will launch a certification system for encodings that capture the entire set of dependencies with full validation against external sources. They will also provide interfaces for retrieving policy texts alongside encodings. And builders can expect more ways to leverage the platform, from new compilation targets to hosted APIs to MCP servers.

The Axiom Foundation goes public today with a live launch briefing at 1:00 PM ET — register here.

About the Axiom Foundation

The Axiom Foundation publishes open, machine-readable encodings of the world’s rules, starting with tax and benefit policy — statutes, regulations, and policy rules turned into cited, time-aware, executable code that anyone can run, audit, or reform. The founding team is Max Ghenis (CEO and Founder), Ariel Kennan (President), and Pavel Makarchuk (Product Lead). The Axiom Foundation is a fiscally sponsored project of the PSL Foundation.

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