Swiss Startup Aims to Tame AI Chaos with New Open Standard

FRIBOURG, SWITZERLAND – April 07, 2026 – In a move to bring order to the burgeoning but chaotic world of generative AI, Swiss startup DEUTLI has published a new open industry standard, .deut, designed to store and exchange the complex parameters used to create AI-generated static images. The announcement signals a significant step toward professionalizing a field currently characterized by fragmented workflows and a lack of interoperability.

The new format, officially registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as application/vnd.deut+json, provides a standardized, machine-readable container for the text prompts, settings, and technical parameters that guide AI image generation. For creators, this promises an end to the cumbersome practice of copying and pasting long, unwieldy text strings between incompatible applications, text editors, and spreadsheets.

From Chaos to Cross-Platform Control

For architects, designers, and visual artists who use generative AI, managing successful image configurations has become a major challenge. A perfectly crafted prompt that yields a stunning result can be easily lost or difficult to replicate across different software tools. DEUTLI aims to solve this by creating a universal language for AI parameters, drawing parallels to the standardization that revolutionized other creative industries.

“Utilizing an open file format has allowed us to implement a system of presets that can be created by the authors themselves or serve as items of exchange and commerce,” noted Yuriy Sydorenko, founder of DEUTLI, in the company's announcement. He explained that this approach aligns with the company's philosophy of “Don't type. Snap it in,” replacing repetitive manual entry with a streamlined selection process.

The vision is to foster a “preset economy,” where high-quality parameter sets can be cataloged, reused, and even sold, much like plugins for design software or presets for professional photography applications like Lightroom. By creating a stable, open foundation, the .deut format could enable a new ecosystem of tools and marketplaces, radically reducing the time and computational resources wasted on regenerating prompts from scratch.

The Prompt as a Protected Digital Asset

Beyond simple organization, the .deut standard addresses a growing concern in the digital art world: authorship and intellectual property. The format’s architecture includes a built-in cryptographic signature mechanism. This feature allows a creator to embed a verifiable digital fingerprint into their parameter set, proving that the author's original intent and configuration have not been altered.

This transforms a prompt from a mere string of text into a secure, traceable digital asset. The specification, hosted publicly on GitHub, describes the format as a “Digital Negative” for generative arts, ensuring provenance tracking via SHA-256 fingerprinting. This technical solution provides a robust method for artists and studios to protect their creative work and intellectual capital.

Furthermore, the standard incorporates built-in versioning, allowing the entire history of changes and experiments to be stored within a single file. For professionals engaged in a process of visual discovery, this offers a powerful form of non-destructive editing. It grants them the ability to instantly roll back to previous successful states, making the often-unpredictable process of AI generation more mathematically predictable and controllable.

A Bold Move in a Nascent Market

The introduction of an IANA-registered standard by a relatively small Swiss startup is a bold strategic play. While the immediate industry reaction and adoption by major AI tool developers remain to be seen—public developer forums and social media show little discussion of the new standard thus far—the move is tapping into a widely recognized need.

Across the tech landscape, from news organizations like the Associated Press to government bodies like the U.S. Department of Commerce, there is a growing chorus calling for standards and best practices to ensure the quality, integrity, and responsible use of generative AI. DEUTLI's initiative directly addresses this demand within the creative sector.

Currently, the competitive landscape for prompt management is a patchwork of ad-hoc solutions. Creatives rely on everything from personal text files and complex node-based workflows in tools like ComfyUI to proprietary prompt-saving features within specific platforms. The .deut format is entering this space not as another proprietary tool, but as a proposed foundational layer upon which anyone can build.

As a gesture of goodwill and a practical entry point, DEUTLI has released a free, privacy-focused metadata extractor for images created in the popular ComfyUI and Automatic1111 environments. The tool operates entirely on the user's local machine, ensuring that sensitive project data is never transmitted externally. This both demonstrates the utility of structured metadata and builds trust with a community rightly concerned about privacy and intellectual property.

While the .deut standard is open and available for anyone to implement, DEUTLI's long-term business strategy appears to be linked to its development. The press release notes that the standard serves as the foundation for the DEUTLI V2 platform, which is currently in active development. This suggests a classic open-core strategy: build an ecosystem around an open standard while offering premium tools and services through a commercial platform. The success of .deut will ultimately depend on its ability to convince a fragmented but innovative community that the benefits of a unified standard outweigh the convenience of their current, individualized workflows.