The Honorable Halt
Safety mechanism that lets an automated process stop itself at a boundary it should not cross, holding a registry of invariants and escalating through four graduated responses with the reasoning recorded.
The honorable halt and the ledger it writes to. The halt supplies the four-rung termination architecture -- hesitate, yield, halt, close the kitchen -- checked against a versioned invariant registry as hard gates. The ledger supplies the append-only, hash-chained record those halts are written into, anchored so the history cannot be rewritten by anyone including its owner. Neither is useful alone: a halt without a tamper-evident record is an assertion, and a ledger with nothing writing conscience into it is an empty chain. Required for any deployment where an agent can take a consequential action.
Safety mechanism that lets an automated process stop itself at a boundary it should not cross, holding a registry of invariants and escalating through four graduated responses with the reasoning recorded.
Append-only, hash-chained record of governance decisions in which each entry links to its predecessor by hash, so the sequence cannot be altered afterwards without the break becoming detectable.