01 / The operating case
What changes in a real workflow?
A payment agent begins a task under policy P-17. Before it releases funds, P-18 lowers the transaction ceiling; the task still holds a cached P-17 decision.
- 01Authority origin
- 02Task and grant
- 03Current decision
- 04Observed outcome
02 / Decision contract
What the executor must check
Pin a single evaluation to immutable P-18 content and record its identifier. Give cached decisions a validity bound, invalidate on relevant policy changes and re-evaluate at the executor for consequential actions.
03 / Failure and evidence
What goes wrong, and what can be proven?
Auditors see only today’s policy and cannot explain yesterday’s ALLOW, or a runtime retains an obsolete high ceiling for the remainder of a long task.
Store policy content digest, version, activation time, decision ID, cache validity and request digest with the executor record.
04 / Canonical scope
Why this reference stands alone
Runtime policy rollout concerns deployment process; this page owns decision provenance and freshness when policy versions change.
Implementation review
Policy history and activation
P-17 active at task start. P-18 active before payment submission with a lower ceiling. The payment decision records P-18 digest, activation time and request hash; it does not inherit P-17 simply because the task began earlier.
Adversarial check
Roll out a lower ceiling during a paused task. Resume with a cached P-17 ALLOW and verify the executor re-evaluates before release.
Primary references