1. The Gap

Under U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/117,812, two semantic agents (100) form a mutual admission compact by appending, each to its own append-only lineage field (104), a single co-signed compact record bearing a signature verifiable against an identity primitive of each party. The record enumerates, conjunctively, a set of reciprocal value-scope tuples, a set of declared relation types applicable between the parties for origin-equivalence class (200) derivation, and a compact validity window. Upon admission, the admission evaluator (120) of each party applies the reciprocal tuples in resolving conduct descriptors of conduct evaluation artifacts (116) received from the other, the compact resolving as of the artifact's assertion time.

The affirmative exit is already priced. Where a party admits a successor to its signed policy object (112), or a successor compact record, that excludes a reciprocal tuple enumerated by the record in force, and the admission occurs within a declared window following the recorded assertion time of a pending artifact implicating that tuple, the exclusion is scored as a deflection event against the narrowing party alone, incrementing that party's refusal counter (304) without either party determining whether the exclusion was well founded.

The validity window opens a route requiring no such admission. It bounds the compact's authority in time, and the record resolves as a signed policy object (112) does, retaining a candidate whose window encloses the relevant time. Paragraph [0473] addresses that route and states its own effect: permitting a compact record to lapse during pendency neither removes the ground of the pending assertion nor escapes the deflection scoring. Renewal is co-signed too, so an expired bilateral record leaves two parties who did not renew it. The filing settles attribution by naming an act: the increment falls on the party that declined to admit a successor, and where neither admitted one, it is scored against neither.

2. Mechanism

What lapses. The compact record carries a canonical alias constituted from the identity primitives of the two co-signing parties together with a successor index, and resolves as a signed policy object (112) does. The validity window bounds authority in time; a co-signed dissolution record appended by both parties revokes the compact. Lapse is the arrival of a time the validity window does not enclose, after which resolution returns no compact record in force under that alias. Paragraph [0473] describes no record appended at that moment.

The trigger, conjunctively. Four conditions are recited together. The compact validity window of the record in force lapses. The lapse falls within a declared window following the recorded assertion time of a pending conduct evaluation artifact (116). That artifact implicates a reciprocal value-scope tuple enumerated by that record. And no successor compact record enumerating that tuple is admitted. They are recited as one condition, not as alternatives.

Routed into the existing path. Where the four hold, the lapse is scored as an exclusion of that tuple and increments the refusal counter (304). It gets no accumulator, threshold, or outcome class of its own, being scored as the event the companion paragraph prices when a party authors the exclusion. That is the recited effect's second limb: the lapse does not escape the scoring.

Attribution by the declining act. The increment falls on the party that declined to admit a successor compact record. Formation and succession both run through the append-only lineage field (104), each party appending the co-signed record to its own, so the charged party is identified by an admission that did or did not occur, not by its posture in the pending assertion.

Two exemptions. Where neither party admitted a successor, the lapse is scored against neither, and a lapse outside the declared window is likewise scored against neither. The companion paragraph carries a matching pair for the authored case: dissolution outside the declared window, or by a co-signed dissolution record appended by both parties, is scored against neither party.

Survival of the ground. The pending conduct evaluation artifact (116) is resolved against the compact record in force at its recorded assertion time notwithstanding the lapse. The formation paragraph applies that binding in the other direction, a compact admitted after the assertion time not being applied to the artifact. That is the recited effect's first limb.

No merits step in the path. Paragraph [0473] conditions the increment on no adjudication, and the companion paragraph states the point expressly for the authored case, scored without either party determining whether the exclusion was well founded. Section 3 sets the same discipline for the counter that takes the increment. Negative limitations attach there to the increment procedure and the gate write: the procedure awaits no adjudication by the principal or any other party; conditions no increment on a finding that an artifact was unfounded, frivolous, abusive, or in bad faith, nor on the absence of such a finding; conditions none on review by an arbiter, a court, a regulator, or an out-of-court dispute settlement body; and conditions none on forfeiture or posting of a stake, bond, deposit, or fee. No field of that counter holds a merits outcome.

3. Operating Parameters

Paragraph [0473] and the Section 10.9 provisions it composes on declare the following. No numeric value is recited for the compact validity window, for the declared window, or for any successor index.

  • The compact validity window. Carried by the compact record and bounding its authority in time. The record resolves as a signed policy object (112) does, a candidate being retained where its window encloses the relevant time.
  • The declared window following the recorded assertion time. The interval within which a lapse is scored, and within which an admitted excluding successor is scored as a deflection event.
  • Successor admission. A successor compact record bears a successor index above the record it succeeds and is admitted only at or above a monotonically non-decreasing floor held in each party's memory field (102) over the compact's canonical alias, a presented predecessor of the floor being rejected. That floor is maintained separately from the floor over the alias of each party's own policy reference field (110).
  • Reciprocal tuple composition. Each tuple names an empathy-scope designation selected from a personal, an interpersonal, and a global scope, a set of action-class identifiers, and a set of scope-partition identifiers.
  • Counter thresholds. The rate threshold is an integer greater than one, and the run threshold is an integer greater than one and not greater than the rate threshold, each retrieved from the signed policy object (112) in force.
  • Metering window expression. An interval of wall-clock time, a count of conduct evaluation artifacts (116) received, or a count of successor epochs of a dynamic agent hash chain. In the successor-epoch embodiment the window is not advanced by another party or by a clock available to the hosting node; a wall-clock window does not carry that property.

4. Composition

Section 10.9 sets out six paragraphs: formation at [0469], succession and anti-rollback at [0470], the union rule at [0471], deflection scoring against a narrowing party at [0472], lapse scoring at [0473], and bounded compact depth at [0474]. The filing introduces Section 10 by stating that each mechanism it contains is a distinct embodiment practicable independently or in combination with any other, so the grouping is compositional rather than indivisible. What [0473] rests on it recites internally: a compact record in force, a validity window capable of lapsing, a successor admitted or not, and the counter that takes the increment.

The union rule bounds what a lapse can reach. Where a reciprocal tuple of the record in force and a tuple of a party's own signed policy object (112) in force both cover the conduct descriptor of an artifact and disagree, the union is applied. A compact record therefore cannot subtract from a party's declared value set or from the tuple of a value carried by that party's own object. What ceases to apply upon lapse is the compact's reciprocal addition.

Downward, the increment lands on a counter resident in the memory field (102) of the metered party, comprising a rate counter (306) and a run counter (308). Upon satisfaction of both thresholds, the refusal counter (304) writes the authorization gate (300) to the withheld state (310) for those action classes recorded in the lineage field (104) as implicated within the current window. The write withholds the faculty of execution alone; the faculty of refusal is not withheld, reduced, or conditioned by it, the agent continuing in the withheld state (310) to receive artifacts, produce determinations of the closed set, and append them.

Sideways, the prospective narrowing bar prices contraction of a party's own declared value set under a pending assertion, and the renunciation record prices relinquishment of an adopted value. Paragraph [0473] extends the same pricing to a record belonging to two parties and shed by neither.

5. Prior-Art Distinction

The categories below are drawn from the filing's background and described structurally. They characterize no product or practice as infringing.

External revocation and credential withdrawal. 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. Such systems, the filing records, provide no procedure by which the agent's own conduct record participates in the determination. A compact record is formed, retained, and applied with no platform, registry, or third party involved, and a lapse of its validity window bears on the non-renewing party's own authorization gate (300).

Merits-conditioned accountability regimes. Article 23(2) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 directs suspension of processing of notices from a notifier that frequently submits manifestly unfounded notices, the unfoundedness adjudicated by the platform. Section 623(a)(8)(F) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act permits a furnisher to decline to investigate a dispute reasonably determined frivolous. Model unfair-claims-practices provisions promulgated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners condition consequences for assertive conduct on an institutional finding of unfair practice, and bonded challenge procedures forfeit a challenger's stake upon a determination that the challenge failed. In each, consequence attaches only after a merits determination, that determination is performed by an institution other than the penalized party, and the faculty suspended is the same faculty that was exercised.

Bilateral exchange settled under a timelock. Atomic swaps and hashed timelock contracts effect a cross-ledger exchange conditioned upon disclosure of a preimage within a timelock, each leg committed to a distributed ledger whose ordering is established by a consensus authority. Bidirectional payment-channel settlement settles a sequence of exchanges against a channel opened from pre-negotiated session state. Each such mechanism requires at least one of a third-party intermediary, a centralized consensus or ordering authority, and pre-negotiated session or channel state.

Capability attenuation along a delegation path. Schemes of the macaroon family confine what a delegate may do by appending caveats along the forward path of a delegation, each holder able to attenuate but not to expand the delegated capability. They operate forward only and attach no consequence to a party that configures what it inherits back. Bounded compact depth runs on a different axis, holding reciprocal terms to the two signatories so that a delegation from a signatory carries no compact tuple to a non-signatory.

6. Disclosure Scope

Lapse scoring during pendency is disclosed in U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/117,812, "Governed Social Conduct of Persistent Semantic Agents Through Record-Grounded Admission of External Conduct Evaluations and Self-Limiting Refusal," in Section 10.9 at paragraph [0473], among the compact-formation, succession, union-rule, deflection-scoring, and bounded-depth paragraphs at [0469] through [0474]. The refusal counter (304), its thresholds, the negative limitations on the increment procedure, and the write of the authorization gate (300) are disclosed in Section 3; value-scope resolution and the two narrowing bars in Section 10.1; the renunciation record in Section 10.6.

Disclosed is the structure set out above: the four conjunctive trigger conditions; the scoring of a qualifying lapse as an exclusion of the reciprocal value-scope tuple; the increment to the refusal counter (304) of the party that declined to admit a successor; the two exemptions; resolution of the pending artifact against the compact record in force at its recorded assertion time notwithstanding the lapse; and the absence of any adjudication of merit as a condition of the increment.

Disclaimed is everything beyond that. The compact validity window, the declared window, and the successor indices are set by the parties and by policy, the filing recites no numeric value for any of them, and none should be inferred here. The counter thresholds are recited as policy-carried integers under the stated inequalities, and numeric values in the filing's worked illustrations are expressly non-limiting. Nothing above states a position on the scope of any claim that may issue; no claim scope is admitted, narrowed, or surrendered; and no license is granted, express or implied. Nothing above asserts that any named system, standard, regulation, protocol, or party infringes any claim, and no described subject matter is admitted to be prior art against any claim of that application or of any application claiming benefit of it. This article is a technical disclosure for public reference, is not a complete account of the filing, is not legal advice, and creates no attorney-client relationship.