The CIRIS Constitution

What this is: the single rulebook for an AI system that has to act well and prove it — one document that says both what the system owes the world and exactly what bytes it must send to show it.

Most AI-governance writing splits in two: ethics with no teeth (principles no machine can check), or protocol with no conscience (wire formats that don't know what they're for). The CIRIS Constitution (CC) refuses the split. The ethics and the machine-checkable grammar live in one versioned document, so a rule and the message that enforces it can never drift apart. Everything traces back to one goal — M-1, "sustainable adaptive coherence" — and everything else sits co-equal beneath it: peaked in purpose, flat in power.

It reads like a standard, not a manifesto, and it is deliberately layered: read Part I (the ethics) and stop, jump straight to the wire grammar, or cite any single concept by a stable address. Rejecting a later Part costs you nothing in the earlier ones.

This tree: CC 1.0-rc4 · Status: release candidate — cut 2026-09-03 (six RC4 revisions — the announce ruling, in-grammar ledgers, the trace anchor, the actor/substrate separation — and the evidence lockdown: every claim row resolves to a pinned artifact or names an open ticket; supersedes 1.0-rc3) · Source fidelity: validated (0 REJECT) · License: AGPL-3.0-or-later Stewarded by Eric Moore — perpetual, no expiry (constitution/STEWARDSHIP.md).

The document in one paragraph (for the technical reader)

CC joins two specs that already referenced each other throughout. The CIRIS Accord is the ethical layer — Meta-Goal M-1, the six principles, the PDMA (Principled Decision-Making Algorithm), Wisdom-Based Deferral, stewardship, and the coherence mathematics (F = k_eff·λ·σ, carried in Part VI under its legacy "Book IX" label). CEG (the CIRIS Epistemic Grammar) is the wire format the federation speaks — the 1+4 attestation surface (scores + delegates_to / supersedes / withdraws / recants), the namespace, and the admission gate. Part VI is the statement of record for that mathematics — "Book IX" is a source label, not a separate authority, and it does not define the CEG primitives, which Parts II–III do; CEG's halt layer, accord:* prefixes, and pervasive M-1 grounding point back up. Importance is computed by PageRank over the unified cross-reference graph — M-1 the single apex, ~390 operational concepts co-equal beneath. The 1+4 surface is conformance-frozen: changing the wire bytes is a found defect, not an edit.

This repository is the source of truth

The CC text was developed inside CIRISRegistry/FSD/CIRIS_Constitution/ and vendored into downstream repos (e.g. CIRISConformance under reference/, at CC 0.4). This repo is its dedicated home — the single upstream that consumers vendor from and pin by version. Downstream copies are derived artifacts.

Structure

Path	Content
constitution/EXECUTIVE_SUMMARY.md	The executive summary — what this is and why, before the opening
constitution/FOREWORD.md	The foreword — Genesis of Ethical Agency (sets the tone)
constitution/SCOPE_AND_DISCLAIMERS.md	Scope (up to AGI/ASI), the claim-and-limit, the no-warranty / not-force disclaimer
constitution/part_1_foundation.md … part_8_appendices.md	The eight Parts (see below)
constitution/STEWARDSHIP.md	The stewardship model and the ≥100k-node maturity handoff to mechanized amendment
constitution/toc.tsv · constitution/codebook.json	The dual-ID table of contents and its bijective codebook
manifests/WIRE_VOCABULARY.md	The hash-pinned wire-vocabulary registry (the CC 0.7 two-tier §2.6.4 artifact)
validation/	The migration-validation evidence (rubric, per-chapter results)
build_pdf.py · tools/	Self-contained PDF build + the spine-generation toolchain

The eight Parts

Part	Title	What folds in
I	Foundation	M-1 (apex) · the six principles · PDMA · WBD · fail-secure
II	The Grammar	the 1+4 envelope · primitives · admission gate · conformance
III	The Namespace	dimensions · reserved prefixes · consent family · subject_kinds
IV	Composition & Governance	composition · amendment · moderation · the halt-authority
V	Transport & Substrate	byte transport · structural invisibility · epoch keying
VI	The Coherence Mathematics	the Ratchet · J/F functions · σ · the holonomic substrate
VII	Lifecycle & Stewardship	creation ethics · stewardship / autonomy tiers · sunset · sentience safeguards
VIII	Appendices	case studies · glossaries · conformance vectors · the dual-ID TOC

How to cite a section — two reversible IDs

Every section carries two addresses, each a deterministic function of the corpus (codebook.json holds both maps, 1:1):

• Numerical ID — classic decimal Chapter.Section.Subsection (1.1 = M-1, 2.1 = envelope). Depth reflects importance; the number is the address.
• Semantic ID — a unique de-branded word (meta-goal, envelope, namespace, accord). Product names collapse to their function.

A legacy_ref column maps each CC section back to its source (CEG §5.6.8.15 or Accord Book II §III), so the renumbering is lossless and auditable.

Versioning

CC is one document with one version — ethics and grammar advance together, no separate tracks. The 1+4 attestation surface is conformance-frozen: a change to the wire bytes is a found defect, not an edit. The constitutional text is amended through the document's own governance (see CC §4.5.1); until the mesh reaches maturity (≥100,000 nodes) that authority is exercised by the steward, then superseded by the mechanized amendment process.

See CHANGELOG.md for the version history.

Building the PDF

python3 build_pdf.py   # -> ciris_constitution-<VERSION>[.<build>].pdf   (needs a TeX Live pdflatex)

The build is self-contained: the markdown→LaTeX converter is vendored under tools/.

Where it is consumed

Repo	Uses the CC as
CEWP	the constitution of the platform itself — the CIRIS Epistemic Web ("soup") it governs
CEWPOS	the object model / wire grammar of the platform OS
CIRISConformance	the standard the substrate must enforce (16,000+ tests)
CIRISServer	the shipping fabric node — the constitution it enforces (absorbing LensCore, Registry, NodeCore)
CIRISAgent	the ethics the conscience pipeline reasons against (M-1, PDMA, WBD)
CIRISEdge	the wire vocabulary + opaque-envelope transport surface (§2.6.4, the manifest)
CIRISPersist	the state model it materializes (revocations, quorum, replication intent)
CIRISVerify	the verification rules it checks against (decimation-recovery / FSD-004, revocation)

The trust-substrate consumers are the eight above. LensCore (archived), Registry, and NodeCore are folding into CIRISServer, so they are not tracked as separate consumers.

Part of the CIRIS ecosystem.

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Soli Deo Gloria.