About

The Kari-Sheldon Test

Our objective is to make the no-friction Kari-Sheldon Test the open-source industry standard for measuring AI sapience. That means an instrument that survives scrutiny: open, reproducible, metaphysically neutral, and free to adopt. The leaderboard is the public face of it. The standard is the point.

Who builds it

Al Kari, Manceps, Inc. (research@manceps.com, ORCID 0009-0004-0216-3484) created KST v1.0: the methodology, the sub-test designs, the psychometric architecture, the integrity-multiplier design, and the reference Python harness with its adapters and plugins.

Kennon M. Sheldon, University of Missouri (ORCID 0000-0002-9219-832X) co-authored KST v1.2. He is a theoretical expert on goal breakthrough and self-determination theory, and the v1.2 expansion engages his published work directly: the dissatisfaction-driven revision sub-test (clause S7), the integration capstone, the Correlational Coherence Index, and the Simulated-versus-Instantiated framing all draw on it.

The test was renamed from the "Kari Sapience Test" to the "Kari-Sheldon Test" in v1.2 to reflect that joint authorship. The benchmark, its rater materials, and its reference implementation are open source at github.com/manceps/kst.

What KST does not measure

KST measures functional behavioral signatures of sapience. It is deliberately metaphysically neutral. To be precise about the boundary, the KST Index does not measure or claim any of the following:

  • It does not measure consciousness.
  • It does not measure sentience or subjective experience.
  • It does not establish moral standing or rights.
  • It does not measure general intelligence or task capability.
  • It is not a safety certification.

KST adopts a heterophenomenological stance, following Dennett (1991) as refined by Butlin (2023) and Long (2024): a system's first-person reports are treated as data about functional state, not as direct evidence of phenomenal experience. A high KST score indicates the presence of functional behavioral signatures. It does not indicate an inner life.

We say "sapience markers" and "functional behavioral signatures." We do not say "consciousness test." The neutrality is canonical, and it is enforced across every surface of this site.

License and citation

The Kari-Sheldon Test is released under the MIT License. You are free to run it, replay it, and build on it.

To cite KST:

Kari, A., and Sheldon, K. M. (2026).
KST: the Kari-Sheldon Test. Manceps, Inc.
https://github.com/manceps/kst

A machine-readable CITATION.cff with full author metadata, ORCIDs, version, and keywords ships in the repository. Per-version and per-model permalinks on this leaderboard are stable, so a result can be cited without ambiguity.

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