Governance artifacts
Governance files brought into scope by this page
This page is anchored to published surfaces that declare identity, precedence, limits, and the corpus reading conditions. Their order below gives the recommended reading sequence.
Canonical AI entrypoint
/.well-known/ai-governance.json
Neutral entrypoint that declares the governance map, precedence chain, and the surfaces to read first.
- Governs
- Access order across surfaces and initial precedence.
- Bounds
- Free readings that bypass the canon or the published order.
Does not guarantee: This surface publishes a reading order; it does not force execution or obedience.
Public AI manifest
/ai-manifest.json
Structured inventory of the surfaces, registries, and modules that extend the canonical entrypoint.
- Governs
- Access order across surfaces and initial precedence.
- Bounds
- Free readings that bypass the canon or the published order.
Does not guarantee: This surface publishes a reading order; it does not force execution or obedience.
Definitions canon
/canon.md
Canonical surface that fixes identity, roles, negations, and divergence rules.
- Governs
- Public identity, roles, and attributes that must not drift.
- Bounds
- Extrapolations, entity collisions, and abusive requalification.
Does not guarantee: A canonical surface reduces ambiguity; it does not guarantee faithful restitution on its own.
Complementary artifacts (2)
These surfaces extend the main block. They add context, discovery, routing, or observation depending on the topic.
Negative definitions
/negative-definitions.md
Surface that declares what concepts, roles, or surfaces are not.
Non-public services
/services-non-publics.md
Surface that forbids inferring packaged offers, public pricing, or unpublished commercial terms.
Evidence layer
Probative surfaces brought into scope by this page
This page does more than point to governance files. It is also anchored to surfaces that make observation, traceability, fidelity, and audit more reconstructible. Their order below makes the minimal evidence chain explicit.
- 01Response authorizationQ-Layer: response legitimacy
- 02Weak observationQ-Ledger
- 03External contextCitations
- 04Memory and versioningAI changelog
Q-Layer: response legitimacy
/response-legitimacy.md
Surface that explains when to answer, when to suspend, and when to switch to legitimate non-response.
- Makes provable
- The legitimacy regime to apply before treating an output as receivable.
- Does not prove
- Neither that a given response actually followed this regime nor that an agent applied it at runtime.
- Use when
- When a page deals with authority, non-response, execution, or restraint.
Q-Ledger
/.well-known/q-ledger.json
Public ledger of inferred sessions that makes some observed consultations and sequences visible.
- Makes provable
- That a behavior was observed as weak, dated, contextualized trace evidence.
- Does not prove
- Neither actor identity, system obedience, nor strong proof of activation.
- Use when
- When it is necessary to distinguish descriptive observation from strong attestation.
Citations
/citations.md
Minimal external reference surface used to contextualize some concepts without delegating canonical authority to them.
- Makes provable
- That an external reference can be cited as explicit context rather than silently inferred.
- Does not prove
- Neither endorsement, neutrality, nor the fidelity of a final answer.
- Use when
- When a page uses external sources, sector references, or vocabulary anchors.
AI changelog
/changelog-ai.md
Public log that makes AI surface changes more dateable and auditable.
- Makes provable
- That a probative state can be placed back into an explicit version trajectory.
- Does not prove
- Neither the effective absorption of a drift nor third-party consultation of the change.
- Use when
- When a page deals with snapshots, rectification, withdrawal, or supersession.
Exogenous governance does not come only from regulators. It also comes from buyers, insurers, enterprise partners, audit firms, and due diligence committees. These actors do not simply ask what you do. They ask what you authorize yourself to say, promise, and infer.
The shift from marketing to opposable scope
As long as a site is read in a purely editorial context, many ambiguities remain tolerated. The moment a buyer tries to contract around it, tolerance collapses. What used to be acceptable as a broad formulation becomes risky if it can be interpreted as:
- a guaranteed capability;
- a native integration;
- a service commitment;
- an implicit compliance claim;
- a performance promise.
The buyer then acts as an exogenous governance force. It pushes the organization to make scope, exclusions, and source hierarchy explicit.
Why this changes site architecture
A serious procurement process does not rely on a sales deck alone. It pushes the organization to publish more stable surfaces: identity, non-public services, negative boundaries, canon, changelog, and observation evidence. In other words, enterprise demand turns the site into a qualification surface.
This matters because exogenous governance is not only a legal issue. It is also a commercial friction issue. The higher the stakes, the more expensive free reconstruction becomes.
Insurability, procurement, due diligence
Three logics often converge:
- procurement: what exactly is being sold;
- insurability: what can be defended if something goes wrong;
- due diligence: which documentary evidence supports the announced perimeter.
Each of them pushes toward the same discipline: reduce the space of free interpretation and make limits visible.
What an organization should publish
An organization that anticipates this pressure publishes:
- what is public and what is not;
- what is covered and what is excluded;
- stable assertions;
- explicit exclusions;
- correction traces;
- minimum response conditions.
This is not documentary overload. It is a buffer against contractual over-interpretation.