An Address Set That Names Nobody the Agent Can Reach

Deference renews nothing for the agent that performs it. Appending a deference record (900), receiving a deference counter-signature (902), and executing under an adopted determination each renew no authorization quantity and replenish no authorization budget (404) of that agent.

Exposure is what the counter-signature opens. Responsive to its receipt, and not otherwise, the deferring agent retrieves from records presented by the followed agent a corrector-class enumeration (904) for the action class of the deference: the set of origin-equivalence classes (200) each recorded in those records both as having corrected the followed agent in that class and as having had its correction thereafter conformed to, membership being established by a two-part conformance filter (906) that admits a class only where both parts hold.

Having verified the presented records under the retrievability-form verification, which verifies form and not merits, the deferring agent appends an exposure edge record (910). Responsive to that record it dispatches to each enumerated class an exposure dispatch record, being a presentation of its own execution records within the action class, in the categories of lineage record disclosure admitted by its counterparty scope object for that class, with a declaration that it admits conduct evaluation artifacts (116) from that class.

Where the dispatch goes is settled by the class-defining reference and not by any class identifier. An origin-equivalence class (200) as derived is local to the agent that derived it: no class identifier is transmitted between agents, neither agent admits a class identifier derived by the other, and the identifier confers no portable standing upon the asserting party (118) assigned to it. What crosses the boundary is the recorded fact defining the class, and the record is dispatched to each identity primitive enumerated in that reference, being the address set of the class.

Sometimes the deferring agent holds a dispatch address for none of those primitives, while the class has already been written into its replenishment register (402) as an admissible-but-unexercised entry. Paragraph [0447] of Section 10.7 settles what the agent's record then says and what becomes of that entry.

What the Branch States, and What It Forecloses

The branch is written as a condition on the class-defining reference rather than on a failed transmission. Where the class-defining reference of an enrolled origin-equivalence class (200) enumerates no identity primitive for which the deferring agent holds a dispatch address, three consequences are stated and two are foreclosed.

Stated:

  • No exposure dispatch record is dispatched for that class.
  • The omission is appended to the agent's append-only lineage field (104), naming the class and the class-defining reference relied upon.
  • The enrollment of that class as an admissible-but-unexercised entry is unaffected by the omission.

Foreclosed: the omission produces no determination concerning any party, and it appends nothing adverse.

Consider what the condition ranges over. A class-defining reference comprises a relation-type designator naming the declared relation type by which the class was evidenced; the defining member of that type, being the recorded introducing party for a common introduction path (206), the common parent dispatch entry for a shared dispatch lineage (202), and the entry bearing two verifiable signatures for a co-signature (204); and the identity primitive of each asserting party (118) recorded as assigned to the class. It is that last enumeration the condition tests against the addresses the agent holds.

A neighboring record does something different. For each excluded class, the exposure edge record (910) carries the part of the conformance filter (906) that failed: either the presented records do not record an accepted determination (122) of the followed agent upon an artifact implicating the action class, or they do not record, within the observation interval, a subsequent conduct record of that agent recorded as compliant. A class caught by the no-address branch is not an excluded class. It was enumerated and enrolled, and what the agent appends is the omission.

The enrollment left standing is itself defined narrowly. An admissible-but-unexercised entry comprises the class-defining reference, the action-class and scope-partition identifiers, a reference to the exposure edge record (910) that occasioned it, and an exercise field written to the unexercised value, keyed on that reference rather than on any class identifier of the followed agent. It has two effects and no third. For admissibility, a conduct evaluation artifact (116) from an asserting party (118) assignable under the ordered test to the class carried is admissible to the deferring agent's admission evaluator (120) for the action class notwithstanding that the agent holds no prior encounter history with that party, and is not held in the pre-settlement inert state on that ground. For renewal, the entry is not counted in the replenishment procedure while its exercise field stands unexercised, the agent's quantities standing as they would have stood had the entry not been written.

Assignability of a later-arriving asserting party (118) to an enrolled class is settled by an ordered test applied to each entry held for the action class and scope partition of the arriving artifact. Direct membership comes first, the arriving party's identity primitive being a member of the enumeration carried in the class-defining reference. Definition membership comes second, the defining member carried being satisfied against the deferring agent's own records and evaluated according to the relation-type designator.

On receipt of an admissible artifact originating from a class carried in such an entry, the deferring agent appends an exercised transition record (908), writes the exercise field to the exercised value, and by the same append adds a deference correction linkage record subject to the conversion bar (502). Budget replenishment is conditioned rather than automatic: where the class is absent from the replenishment register (402) for the declared window, an entry is written to that register and the authorization budget (404) is replenished, without regard to any determination of whether the arriving artifact was well founded.

Policy-Declared Quantities and the Absence of a Numeric Trigger

The paragraph disclosing this branch declares no numeric parameter: no threshold, no minimum count of reachable identity primitives, no retry interval, no deadline. Its trigger is a set condition, that the enumeration contains no identity primitive for which a dispatch address is held.

Quantities governing the surrounding machinery are declared in a signed policy object (112), and the filed disclosure supplies no value for any of them.

  • The enrollment window, declared in the deferring agent's signed policy object (112), upon whose expiry an entry still standing at the unexercised value is written to a lapsed value.
  • The observation interval applied in the second part of the two-part conformance filter (906): the interval declared for the action class in the deferring agent's own policy object, and otherwise that declared for the followed agent where not longer than a maximum so declared, a longer declared interval being replaced by that maximum.
  • The minimum count of complied conduct records, where the corrector-class enumeration (904) is computed with the second part requiring a count not less than a declared minimum rather than a single complied record.
  • The amount by which an electing agent decrements its own authorization budget (404) for an elective enrollment, declared in that agent's own policy object.
  • The window declared for the replenishment register (402), within which a class already entered bars a further entry and a further replenishment, an entry being removed on expiry.

Disclosure breadth is not a global setting either. Categories of lineage record disclosure carried in an exposure dispatch record are those admitted by the deferring agent's counterparty scope object for that class. No value is stated for any of these quantities, and none should be inferred from this article.

Neighboring Embodiments Along the Earned-Exposure Path

Sections 9.7, 9.8, and 9.9 build the path this branch sits on, ending in the exercised transition record (908) that binds a correction later received to the deference that earned the exposure through which it arrived. Section 10.7 carries additional embodiments of that path, this branch among them.

Immediately before it stands the lapse rule. An admissible-but-unexercised entry standing at the unexercised value upon expiry of an enrollment window declared in the deferring agent's signed policy object (112) is written to a lapsed value and ceases to confer admissibility, the lapse being appended to the append-only lineage field (104), producing no determination concerning the class enrolled, incrementing no counter, modifying no value of the scoped integrity vector (106), and appending nothing adverse to any party.

The subject of the no-address condition is an enrolled origin-equivalence class (200). Section 10.7 separately discloses elective exposure enrollment without deference, in which an agent retrieves a second agent's corrector-class enumeration, appends an elective exposure enrollment record, decrements its own authorization budget (404) by a declared amount, and writes each enumerated class into its own register as an admissible-but-unexercised entry, no deference record (900) being appended.

Unreachability surfaces elsewhere in the filing on comparable terms. Within the acknowledgment procedure, an acceptance determination is produced by an asserting party (118) assigned to the harmed class rather than by the agent or its principal, and an undeliverable outcome where no such party is reachable at a recorded transport address leaves the authorization gate (300) provisional, applies no further authorization budget (404) decrement, and appends nothing adverse to any asserting party (118).

Structural Contrasts With Registry, Decision-Point, and Revocation Designs

The filing's background describes several established categories that confront an unreachable counterparty, each resolving the condition somewhere other than this branch does.

Reputation and trust systems compute a score for an entity from ratings or observations supplied by other entities and expose that score to parties deciding whether to transact, locating it at a registry, a scoring authority, or a shared ledger, with the scored entity neither holding the score nor participating in its computation. The filing takes a different structural position: assignment to an origin-equivalence class (200) is evaluated by the agent upon entries of its own append-only lineage field (104) and upon counterparty identity records (114) it holds, without reference to a centralized registry, without query to a directory, without participation in a consensus procedure, and without coordination with a further execution node.

Governance and policy-enforcement systems evaluate a proposed action against policy before it is performed and return a decision. Systems implementing the XACML standard return one drawn from permit, deny, not-applicable, and indeterminate, a result directed at the request and returned to the requesting party. Where an attribute required for evaluation is unavailable, such systems return an error or indeterminate status or deny the action, and in neither case is the unavailability recorded as a persistent state of the decider that constrains its own subsequent operation. The no-address branch parts company on both counts. Nothing is returned to a requesting party, and the unavailability is written into the agent's own append-only lineage field (104) while the enrollment stands.

Accountability protocols for distributed systems, exemplified by PeerReview, detect and prove node misbehavior from tamper-evident logs, the verdict being held by auditors: witness nodes collect evidence concerning an accused node and third parties verify the proof. Remote attestation architectures, exemplified by the architecture of RFC 9334, similarly locate the appraisal of evidence in a verifier and the consequent grant or denial of authority in a relying party. Whose record carries the unresolved condition is the distinction here. Nothing is submitted to an auditor or a verifier, and the absence of a held address becomes an entry of the agent's own lineage.

External revocation systems for autonomous agents issue and withdraw credentials from an identity provider or control plane, terminating an agent's ability to act by an act of the controlling authority, with no procedure by which the agent's own conduct record participates in the determination. Under this branch no controlling authority is in the loop, and the record captures a condition of the agent's own holdings.

These comparisons are drawn at the level of architecture: where the address set lives, who evaluates reachability, and whose record an unresolved condition enters. They describe categories of design, not the operation of any named product or service.

Disclosure Scope

The mechanism described here is disclosed in U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/117,812, at Section 10.7, paragraph [0447], as an embodiment styled the exposure-dispatch no-address omission branch. Supporting structure appears in the same filing at Sections 9.7, 9.8, and 9.9, which disclose non-renewal upon deference, the corrector-class enumeration (904), the two-part conformance filter (906), the exposure edge record (910), the exposure dispatch record and its address set, the admissible-but-unexercised entry, the ordered assignability test, and the exercised transition record (908); at Section 2.2, for derivation of the origin-equivalence class (200), the declared relation types, and the locality of the class identifier; at Section 4.5, for the replenishment register (402) and the window declared for it; at Section 5, for the conversion bar (502); at paragraph [0340] of Section 10.1; at paragraphs [0439], [0443], and [0446] of Section 10.7; and, for the categories contrasted above, at background paragraphs [0004], [0007], [0010], and [0011]. This article is a technical description for public disclosure, not a claim construction, and the operative disclosure is the filed application text.