# Protected Message Charter

**Canonical baseline:** `task_frontier_v3.tex`, SHA-256
`f527d1b6a026790f5d59134e2f9ba76497f25fcc5c1e06c7429b045eefdb0ca1`
(v3.7, 2026-07-07).

**Purpose:** revisions may change assumptions, notation, theorem statements, proof
architecture, calibration, section order, and scope, but they must preserve the
economic content below.

## Protected messages

1. The economically relevant state of frontier AI is not adequately summarized by a
   single quality index. It has at least two economically distinct capability margins:
   horizon and forgiveness/reliability.
2. The distinction is grounded in a serial-task technology with retries: longer tasks
   compound errors, while retries, monitoring, rollback, or reversibility relax that
   compounding.
3. Imitation is directional. Demonstrated plans and scaffolds can diffuse faster than
   certified tail reliability, so imitation can affect the direction—not merely the
   level—of frontier investment.
4. Directional persistence can rotate investment toward the hard-to-copy reliability
   margin and, when progress is sufficiently lumpy, can make rival laboratories crowd
   onto that margin.
5. Liability and public verification infrastructure act differently: both can affect
   reliability, but one strengthens private incentives and the other accelerates
   diffusion, so their effects on competitive advantage can have opposite signs.

## Permitted precision changes

- “If and only if,” uniqueness, strict monotonicity, exactness, and global-dynamics
  language may be weakened or conditioned when the mathematics requires it.
- The task measure may retain primitive task heterogeneity beyond the two capability
  requirements; this does not change the claim that system capability and the served
  frontier have two relevant margins.
- Reduced-form lags may be replaced by an explicit certification/entry equilibrium.
- The local direction game may be replaced by a repeated or Markov game.
- Numerical calibration may be revised or removed if public data do not identify its
  inputs. The theoretical message does not depend on a fabricated or weakly supported
  number.
- “Concentration” must be tied to a modeled market-structure statistic (market share,
  HHI, entry, or margins), rather than used as a synonym for capability gap.

## Non-negotiable research discipline

- No referee request is accepted merely because it sounds sophisticated; it must
  strengthen a protected message or remove a valid obstacle to it.
- A symbolic or numerical check is supporting evidence, not proof of a universal
  theorem unless its domain is itself exhaustively characterized.
- Current public facts and citations must be refreshed before every submission round.
- Internal simulated referees are screening devices. Actual editorial and referee
  decisions remain the acceptance criterion.