Speaking AI's Language: How Checkmate Live's Machine-Readable Fair Play Protocol Is Changing the Game
April 8, 2025
In the rapidly evolving landscape of competitive gaming and mind sports, maintaining integrity has become increasingly complex. As AI systems grow more sophisticated, the line between human and machine capabilities continues to blur, creating new challenges for platforms committed to fair play.
Today, we're proud to announce a significant step forward in addressing these challenges: Checkmate Live has become the first competitive gaming platform to implement a machine-readable Fair Play Protocol for artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs).
The Problem: AI's Growing Role in Gaming
The integration of AI into gaming environments has accelerated at an unprecedented pace. From game design and testing to content creation and player assistance, AI has transformed nearly every aspect of the gaming experience.
For mind sports like chess, this isn't a new battle. The community has long contended with chess engines that can play at superhuman levels. What was once a rare, sophisticated form of cheating has become increasingly accessible, with powerful engines available on any smartphone. Now, with the rise of large language models and AI agents, the integrity challenges have multiplied exponentially.
Whilst today's LLMs still fail to match the strength of specialised engines like Stockfish in chess, their rapid evolution presents significant challenges for all online providers. Their improving capabilities, combined with their conversational interfaces and ability to explain moves rather than just suggest them, requires a proactive approach before they become a major threat.
This rapid AI evolution has introduced complex integrity issues across all competitive gaming. How do we ensure AI systems understand and follow the rules that human players are expected to adhere to? How can platforms communicate their policies effectively to both humans and machines? Most importantly, how do we preserve the essence of human competition in an age of ubiquitous AI assistance?
The Solution: Speaking AI's Language
Our answer is simple yet powerful: if we want AI to follow our rules, we need to speak its language.
Checkmate Live's machine-readable Fair Play Protocol—published as an "llms.txt" file—establishes clear guidelines for how AI systems may interact with our platform. This approach enables AI to "read" and automatically comply with our integrity policies while implementing strict privacy guardrails, creating a more transparent relationship between human-centered gameplay and AI capabilities.
The protocol covers critical areas including:
- Fair Play Rules: Clear directives prohibiting AI from simulating human players or providing gameplay assistance
- Anti-Cheat Restrictions: Specific guidelines preventing the extraction of game data through OCR or computer vision
- Privacy Guardrails: Explicit limitations on AI access to player data and private information
- Identity Protection: Rules against using AI for identity verification fraud
- Data Usage Guidelines: Protection of Checkmate Live's proprietary data and intellectual property
- Crawl Policies: Defined pathways for LLMs and AI systems to access appropriate information
Beyond Chess: Creating an Industry Standard
While Checkmate Live's primary focus is chess and mind sports, we recognise that the challenges we face extend across the entire competitive gaming ecosystem. In line with our community mindset, we've made the decision to open-source our protocol under the MIT Licence.
This move allows other gaming platforms, esports organisations, chess websites, and mind sports competitions to adopt or customise our framework for their own integrity needs. By open-sourcing our protocol, we hope to collaborate on an industry standard that benefits the entire competitive gaming ecosystem.
"We've always believed that integrity-first gaming is a collective responsibility," explains our Head of Integrity. "By open-sourcing our protocol, we're inviting collaboration across the industry to strengthen the barrier between fair play and AI misuse."
Addressing the Critics: Beyond Simple Rule-Setting
Some may question whether a machine-readable protocol can truly prevent cheating. After all, couldn't users simply instruct their LLMs to ignore these rules?
We're well aware of this limitation. The llms.txt file is not designed to be a complete solution on its own, but rather one layer in a sophisticated, multi-layered defence system. Here's how we address this concern:
- Responsible AI Compliance: Major AI providers are increasingly building their systems to respect standard machine-readable protocols. By publishing our rules in this format, we ensure that responsible, mainstream AI systems will comply with our guidelines.
- Detection Regardless of Compliance: Our Sixth-i system doesn't rely on AI compliance to detect cheating. Its multimodal analysis can identify suspicious patterns regardless of whether an AI is following the llms.txt instructions. Even if someone instructs their LLM to ignore our rules, the behavioural patterns, telemetry signals, and video analysis will still flag suspicious activity.
- Honeypot Systems: We employ sophisticated honeypot technology to identify AI systems attempting to circumvent our rules, capturing both their digital fingerprints and behavioural patterns for future detection.
- Legal and Terms Framework: The protocol establishes clear terms of service violations, making enforcement actions more straightforward when cheating is detected.
"Think of the llms.txt protocol as similar to locks on doors," explains Joan Buch Parades, our Head of Integrity. "A determined thief might break a lock, but that doesn't mean locks are worthless—they deter opportunistic violations, establish clear boundaries, and work as part of a broader security system that includes alarms, cameras, and guards.
The Future of Fair Play
As AI capabilities continue to advance, the need for clear, enforceable protocols will only grow. Machine-readable guidelines like our llms.txt file represent an important evolution in how we approach integrity in competitive environments.
By establishing these standards now, we're not just addressing current challenges—we're preparing for a future where the intersection of human skill and AI capability will become increasingly complex.
We invite the entire gaming community to join us in this effort. The full llms.txt file is available at https://www.checkmate.live/llms-txt, and we welcome feedback, suggestions, and collaborations as we continue to refine and expand this approach.
In the game of integrity, we all win when the rules are clear—to both humans and machines.
Checkmate Live is a next-generation tournament and broadcast platform for chess and mind sports, combining real-time video battles, collectible-driven arcade play, and competitive tournaments. The platform is the exclusive online partner of the Asian Chess Federation and the Arab Esports Federation. Winner of the 2024 ANZSTA Australia and New Zealand Sports Technology Award for Gaming and Esports.