Release Policy

The gate is a predicate over claims. The build is a separate, expensive function of a tree. Conflating them is what makes a green check mean “some machine you don’t control ran something.” Keeping them apart is what lets a party with no compute reach the same verdict as one with a build farm (R3).

Shape

Release of artifact digest D from tree T under policy P holds when all of the following are true at evaluation time:

1. No falsified premise. No claim in the transitive dependsOn closure rooted at T’s claim set has status falsified.
2. Bounded residue. Claims with status unevaluated are within P’s allowance, and each excess is covered by a residue-acceptance record signed by a key P names.
3. Origin floor. Claims that P designates load-bearing have origin.kind = harness-observed. Agent-asserted claims may inform, but P should not let them alone carry a release.
4. Builder agreement. K independent producers have signed statements with subject D for tree T, each meeting P’s hermeticity floor.

Condition 4 is where “true artifact” actually lives, and it is the expensive one. Available — E2 passed (same-triple divergences all cheap-to-fix; K-of-N agreement is per target triple).

Evaluation is live, not frozen

The artifact carries a pointer to (T, P), not a verdict. Consumers re-evaluate. If a load-bearing claim is falsified after release, the artifact’s status changes with no byte moving and no re-signing — the property from README that justifies the project. T is an elench tree OID (ADR-0001), not a git commit. The git projection (ADR-0002) is not consulted at evaluation time.

This is certificate-revocation shaped and inherits its problems: consumers who never re-check are unprotected, and there is no push path. Do not pretend otherwise in the docs.

Artifact format

The artifact is serialized as JSON and validated against schema/artifact.schema.json. Fields:

• version — format version (current: "0.1"). Consumers SHOULD reject unknown major versions.
• tree — elench tree OID (64 hex chars).
• policy — policy name under which the artifact was released.
• digest — SHA-256 digest of the artifact (binary, container image).
• released_at — Unix epoch seconds. NOT a verdict.
• description — optional human-readable description.

No verdict field. No pass/fail. The artifact is a pointer; the consumer re-evaluates.

Deliberately not specified

• What K should be. Depends on how many independent builders exist, which is an organisational fact, not a design one.
• Cross-party reconciliation. Two evaluators with different P reaching different verdicts is correct behaviour, not a bug. Out of scope.
• Emergency override. Every real system grows one. Specifying it now would be guessing; leaving it unspecified means it will be added badly under pressure. Flagged, not resolved.