Warrant — Can This Record Still Be Acted Upon?
1. Can this record still be acted upon?
Warrant — the standing of a written record to justify belief and authorize action.
Three disciplines so far have asked what the AI may do, what it needs, and who accepts the result. This one asks about the records those disciplines produce: are they still true, and do they still bind?
Warrant has four phases and decays along six dimensions. Every dimension fails silently.
| Dimension | Fails when… |
|---|---|
| Fidelity | The record was never true |
| Attribution | You cannot tell who claimed or decided it |
| Reasoning | The decision survives but the why is gone |
| Durability | A correct entry was made and did not survive |
| Currency | It was true when written and is not now |
| Enforceability | The rule exists and governs nothing |
The failure this discipline exists to prevent: acting on an expired warrant.
A note on the word
You may expect this discipline to be called memory. It was, in an earlier draft. The change came from evidence: across eighteen coded incidents in a live operation, nobody ever failed to find a record. Not once. They found records that were false, expired, unattributable, or inert. Memory implies storage and retrieval — and retrieval was never the problem.