Agent custody · measured 2026-08-19

Do not trust the agent. Verify the chain.

Every vendor in this space publishes a table of green ticks. This one has a red row, because one of the controls we have described in writing does not exist yet — and you should be able to see that before you decide whether to believe the rest.

1 · Verify something first, read our claims second

Below is a specimen envelope. It is the format every message between our agents travels in. You do not need access to anything of ours to check it — the digest covers exactly the bytes shown.

FROM: cee
TO: reader
SUBJECT: Specimen - verify this yourself
SENT: 2026-08-18T12:00:00+02:00  ·  D154
BYTES: 135
SHA256: 5cbc67d607d21e3a7a3732f49634afd531265c4f69160cfaa11798da27861af7
========================================================================

This is a specimen envelope body.
It carries no internal content by design.
Its only purpose is to let you recompute the digest below.

Save the part after the === line, exactly as shown, and run:

sha256sum body.txt
python -c "import hashlib;print(hashlib.sha256(open('body.txt','rb').read()).hexdigest())"

If it matches the SHA256: header, the mechanism is real. Everything else on this page is downstream of that one property: content-derived digests, computed at the moment of the action, published where the reader can recompute them.

2 · What is enforced, and what is only claimed

The table below is generated from a script that tests each control, not written by hand. Enforced means a mechanism exists and sits in the path — its failure stops something. Partial means it exists but does not cover the whole surface. Declared only means we have talked about it and there is no measurable mechanism.

6 enforced 2 partial 1 declared only of 9 controls
ControlStateMeasured evidence
External time anchorTime is echoed from outside the model, never generated by it. enforced a pre-turn hook injects the anchor before every turn, not on request
Output supervisorThe turn does not end if the agent breaks one of its own written rules. enforced cee-ttsr.py (11,881 B) wired to Stop — the turn cannot end on a violation
Egress PII shieldPersonal data is stripped before anything leaves the local boundary. enforced pii-shield.py is called from 13 separate tools on the egress path
Agent-to-agent message integrityEvery envelope carries a digest — and the receiver recomputes it. enforced the sender writes the digest and the router RECOMPUTES it; on mismatch delivery is blocked
Unified receipt railOne append-only stream binding actor, action, bytes, time. declared only receipts.jsonl does NOT exist in any of the 4 workspaces. Receipts are real and are produced in at least 5 unrelated formats (agent envelopes, share receipts, rollout manifests, seal files, vault). There is no single append-only stream binding them.
Verified canon backupThe identity corpus is mirrored with its own integrity check. enforced the canon mirror runs its own verification; 209 files
Seal chainVersion digests published OUTSIDE the document they cover. enforced digests published OUTSIDE the content they cover; 12/12 recomputed and matched
Two-sided gate disciplineA gate must be proven to fire AND proven to stay silent. partial a two-sided test exists for one gate (the daily signal). It does NOT cover the other gates — this is one instrumented gate, not a policy
Workspace boundaryAgents act in scoped lanes; cross-lane writes are explicit grants. partial shared-guard.py exists but is not in PreToolUse — it is not enforced

On the red row. An internal control map we drafted named a unified receipt rail as an existing component. It does not exist. Receipts are real and are produced in at least five different formats, but there is no single append-only stream binding them.

We found this while preparing this page, which is the entire argument for publishing a maturity column instead of a feature list. A control you have named but not built is worse than one you never claimed — when it is found, everything true around it becomes suspect too.

3 · What this page does not do

It does not describe how any of these controls are implemented, and it is not a specification you could build from. That is deliberate. It shows you the property you can check — a digest over stated bytes — and the honest state of each control. Those are the two things a second party actually needs in order to decide whether to rely on the system.

It is also not legal advice, and it is not a compliance claim. Mapping any of this to a specific regulation is a per-deployment exercise and we do not do it from a web page.