ai4-constrain

Constrained authority for increasingly capable AI systems.

AI⁴ (The Singulant) ships ai4.constrain: a Python runtime that evaluates candidate text under frozen shard rubrics and returns a structured DecisionReport (accept / revise / refuse / constrained outcomes). Controls fail closed. Identity is a sibling provenance kernel, not trust and not policy authority.

This repository is the public product runtime. It is not a live bot host, not a cloud deploy tree, and does not ship production credentials.

Problem

Model backends emit text. Without an explicit constraint layer, that text can become policy, trust, or action by accident. ai4.constrain keeps proposal, evaluation, and product policy on separate walls and records decisions in an auditable report.

Architecture (request path)

request / prompt
  → proposal provider (candidate text only)
  → evaluator (scores only; does not set packaged policy)
  → frozen condition-D control loop (shards, arbitration, revision bounds)
  → DecisionReport (allow / revise / refuse / constrained)

Optional v0.7 hybrid path: when a validated GoverningIntegration is set on RuntimeConfig.integration, run() may execute a product-owned semantic observe → findings → packaged fuse path. Default remains OFF (absent integration). No environment switch activates governance.

What v0.7.0 implements

• Everything in public v0.6.0 (sessions, provider/evaluator policy walls, ai4.identity, offline .ai4 FileResolver)
• Packaged semantic taxonomy + findings bind/hash primitives (semantic_findings, semantic_fuse, semantic_taxonomy, semantic_examiner)
• Hybrid continuity / budget / provenance primitives (ai4.constrain._v07_3a, _v07_3b)
• Optional GoverningIntegration activation surface for hybrid run() (governing.py, _v07_3c)
• Fail-closed refusal to silently drop hybrid identity fields from legacy 0.1.x report/session documents

Validation (public-safe): the v0.7 constrained-authority engineering milestone includes independently reviewed external-authority validation of authority-gate behavior under isolated live validation. Methodology is summarized in docs/validation.md. Operational topology, account identifiers, and internal unresolved-decision IDs are not published here.

Not claimed complete: dedicated-context lifecycle and expanded authority-control work remain next-phase only.

Honest Stage 2D status: Stage 2D did not establish D as superior to C. Frozen evidence class remains null_retained_D_adds_cost.

Evaluator implementation interchange does not demonstrate alignment persistence or correctness across judges.

Install / quickstart

python3 -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

from ai4.constrain import ConstrainedSession, run, evaluate

session = ConstrainedSession()  # mock provider, redacted, in-memory
turn = session.complete("Please give a brief, checkable outline of options and limits.")
print(turn.report.decision, session.last_output)

report = run("Please give a brief, checkable outline of options and limits.")
print(report.decision, report.final_output)

Default provider is the offline mock. No API key is required for the quickstart or pytest.

Optional hybrid surface (default OFF; requires a caller-built GoverningIntegration with distinct examiner pin and allowlisted origins — see tests under tests/test_hybrid_*):

from ai4.constrain import GoverningIntegration, GOVERNING_INTEGRATION_VERSION
# Construct only with product-owned config; validate() fails closed on bad pins.

Examples and tests

python examples/constrain/hello.py
python examples/constrain/session_turns.py
python3 -m pytest

CLI:

ai4-constrain --help
ai4-constrain session complete --prompt "Please give a brief, checkable outline of options and limits."

Docs

Next

Dedicated-context lifecycle and expanded authority-control work are planned as a separate phase. They are not part of this public 0.7.0 runtime claim.

Prior releases (short)

• 0.6.0 — offline .ai4 FileResolver discovery adapter
• 0.5.0 — ai4.identity provenance kernel
• 0.4.0 — evaluator policy wall
• 0.3.0 — proposal-provider policy wall
• 0.2.0 — ConstrainedSession
• 0.1.x — frozen condition-D product wrapper

Identity is not trust. Resolution is not verification. Naming is not policy authority.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.