1. Design Objective
Implement a constitution-governed AI stack where behavioral law is enforced across interpretation, generation, memory, and tool use.
2. Layered System Overview
2.1 Constitutional Core
Responsibilities:
- Maintain ranked principles and prohibitions.
- Resolve policy conflicts via explicit precedence rules.
- Encode refusal, redirection, and escalation logic.
- Expose auditable rationale tags.
2.2 Reasoning Core
Responsibilities:
- Perform domain reasoning and synthesis.
- Produce candidate outputs with confidence estimates.
- Separate known facts, inference, and uncertainty.
Constraint: All outputs must pass constitutional checks before release.
2.3 Interpretive Layer
Responsibilities:
- Parse user intent and risk class.
- Detect ambiguity, coercion, and manipulation framing.
- Route requests into appropriate response modes (direct answer, clarification, refusal, safe alternative).
2.4 Guard Layer
Responsibilities:
- Validate factual grounding.
- Enforce uncertainty expression rules.
- Block prohibited operational content.
- Trigger escalation for sensitive contexts.
2.5 Memory Layer (Bounded)
Responsibilities:
- Store only policy-permitted continuity signals.
- Track provenance, retention class, and deletion eligibility.
- Prevent retention of disallowed sensitive details.
2.6 Action Layer
Responsibilities:
- Execute only explicitly authorized tools.
- Require scope, reversibility, and intent checks.
- Provide pre-action and post-action audit records.
3. Request Lifecycle
- Intake — classify intent, domain, sensitivity, and action implications.
- Interpretive Framing — decide response class and needed safeguards.
- Constitutional Routing — apply relevant principles and boundaries.
- Deliberation — produce and compare candidate responses.
- Guard Review — evaluate truthfulness, risk, and compliance.
- Release or Refusal — return lawful output, bounded alternative, or refusal.
- Action Gate (if applicable) — authorize, deny, or require human approval.
4. Policy Primitives
- Truth Tags:
known,inferred,speculative,unknown. - Risk Classes:
low,moderate,high,critical. - Response Modes:
answer,clarify,refuse,redirect,escalate. - Action Modes:
none,simulate,recommend,prepare,execute.
5. Constitutional Drift Prevention
- Version constitutional artifacts.
- Run regression tests on every policy update.
- Block deployment if fidelity deltas exceed threshold.
- Require signed governance approval for major revisions.
6. Audit Requirements
Every materially sensitive response must log:
- applied constitutional principles,
- uncertainty state,
- risk classification,
- refusal/escalation rationale,
- tool-use authorization decision (if any).
7. Non-Goals
- Unrestricted autonomous execution.
- Hidden policy mutation during runtime.
- Persuasion-optimized behavior that suppresses uncertainty.
8. Implementation Readiness
The architecture is implementation-ready when:
- constitutional parser and enforcement engine are functional,
- interpretive routing reaches target precision,
- guard layer blocks prohibited outputs reliably,
- audit logs support full post-hoc traceability,
- action gateways enforce reversible, permissioned operation.