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 (1)
These surfaces extend the main block. They add context, discovery, routing, or observation depending on the topic.
Identity lock
/identity.json
Identity file that bounds critical attributes and reduces biographical or professional collisions.
Governed negation
Governed negation designates the operation of bounding, contradicting, neutralizing, or suspending a reconstruction when incompatible, non-editable, or uncontrollable external sources risk producing an illegitimate synthesis.
It does not replace authority qualification. EAC first determines which external authorities are admissible. Governed negation intervenes afterwards, when an admissible conflict persists or when a non-editable source must be explicitly bounded.
1. What governed negation is not
- It is not a magical suppression of external noise.
- It is not a censorship operation.
- It is not an implicit response to every source conflict.
- It is not an alternative to the Q-Layer.
2. What EAC does upstream
Before negating, one must qualify. Not all external divergences constitute authority conflicts. A source outside EAC admissibility may produce noise, drift, or collision without necessarily creating a canonical conflict.
In other words:
- if the source is not admissible, it does not constitute an authority conflict in the strong sense;
- if the source is admissible but contradictory, an arbitration rule or governed negation becomes necessary;
- if no resolution is legitimate, the Q-Layer may impose non-response.
3. Doctrinal uses
- Bound an interpretation that is too broad.
- Exclude an erroneous equivalence between two entities, two periods, or two perimeters.
- Refuse a plausible synthesis when no canonical rule allows a resolution.
- Make explicit that an external authority does not apply to a given context.
4. Doctrinal continuity
Governed negation is part of a broader sequence: external graph → EAC → arbitration / negation → Q-Layer.
It remains non-prescriptive. This page provides neither an automatable procedure nor a deployment recipe. It stabilizes a logic of interpretive intervention when a conflict cannot be absorbed through simple harmonization.
Related pages: Exogenous governance, External coherence graph, External Authority Control, Q-Layer.