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Governance

Evidence an auditor will accept.

Most agent tooling produces logs. Logs are not evidence. Cognition Engines ingests events, links them to the decisions they support, maps them to named controls in recognised frameworks, and exports a bundle whose chain can be independently verified.

The distinction most systems skip

Evidence is classified by where it came from, and the two classes are not interchangeable. This is enforced in the mapping rules themselves, not left to the reader.

observed

Third-party events the agent cannot author — GitHub pull request opens, reviews, approvals and merges. This is the class that carries weight, because the agent is not the source.

attested

First-party CSTP decision records — the agent's own account of its reasoning, confidence and stakes. Useful corroboration, but an agent can write anything here. Controls satisfied only by attested rules are flagged attested_onlyin the exported bundle.

Fail closed, not open.Controls that assert independent human review require a human actor signal on the upstream event — actor_is_humanon approvals, human_approval_counton merges. If the webhook does not supply them, the rule grants no control credit and the gap is surfaced rather than silently passed.

Control frameworks mapped

3 mapping files ship in the repository. Each rule names the framework function it satisfies, the lifecycle stage it belongs to, and the event pattern that triggers it.

SR 11-7

Federal Reserve Supervisory Guidance on Model Risk Management

observed9 rules
Model DevelopmentModel ValidationChange Management

NIST AI RMF

NIST Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework 1.0

observed8 rules
GOVERNMAPMEASUREMANAGE

CSTP Attested

First-party decision records recorded by the agent itself

attested3 rules
GOVERNModel DevelopmentModel Validation

The evidence pipeline

  1. 01cstp.ingestEvidence

    Take in an event from an upstream system.

  2. 02cstp.linkEvidence

    Bind that event to the decision it evidences.

  3. 03cstp.mapControls

    Resolve which framework controls the event satisfies.

  4. 04cstp.exportEvidenceBundle

    Emit the packaged bundle for review.

  5. 05cstp.verifyEvidenceChain

    Re-check the chain's integrity independently.

5 of 34 CSTP methods, verified present in the dispatcher.

Prevention and self-assessment

Expression guardrails

Guardrails can be written as CEL expressions evaluated against the proposed action, alongside the built-in rule logic. Policies live in version control and are reviewed like any other change.

Circuit breakers

Repeated failures in a category trip a breaker, whose state is inspectable and resettable through the protocol rather than buried in process memory.

Calibration

Brier scoring against logged outcomes, reported per category, with reason-type statistics showing which kinds of justification actually predict success.

Drift detection

Calibration is tracked over time, so a quietly degrading agent becomes a signal you can act on rather than an incident you discover.

Verify this page. Every count above is generated directly from the source repository at build time. Nothing here is hand-typed prose about the system's size or surface.