Technical report / Version 1
Acceptance Before Export: A Bounded Evidence Contract for Governance Telemetry
OPAQUE Systems
Abstract
An operational telemetry backend can lose events through sampling, retention and exporter failures. Its observations therefore cannot, by themselves, establish complete governance evidence. We describe a source-side acceptance boundary in AgenTrust Telemetry: validate a metadata-constrained event, check context correlation, accept an isolated representation into a run-scoped cryptographic prefix, and only then attempt operational projections. In a durable configuration, an external callback must acknowledge persistence before the local prefix advances. Export failures remain distinct from evidence failures. We formalize the conditional ordering property and test its limits, including acknowledgment loss and an empty accumulator declared complete. At a pinned source revision, 111 Python tests and 13 portable conformance fixtures produced expected results on September 4 and again on September 27, 2026. Four additional probes demonstrate both the useful separation and the absence of automatic completeness or distributed exactly-once persistence. The contribution is a precise contract for acceptance before export, with explicit trust and recovery obligations, rather than a claim that a hash chain proves every event occurred.
What this report contributes
A source-side contract that accepts each governance event into a run-scoped cryptographic prefix before operational export, keeping export failures separate from evidence failures.
Evidence and limits
- Software-only. At the pinned agentrust-telemetry commit 29c13cf, 111 Python tests and 13 conformance fixtures gave expected results on September 4 and again on September 27, 2026. The TypeScript suite was not run.
- No durable store, crash-restart, multi-process or deployed-exporter experiment was run. Acknowledgment loss repeats external writes; exactly-once persistence is not provided.
- An empty accumulator can be sealed as complete. Completeness remains a producer assertion, not something the contract measures.
The source package preserves the recorded inputs and results. Tests, fixtures and boundary probes were rerun at the pinned commit for this edition. No independent replication is claimed.
Read the current specification and implementation guidance. This report describes an earlier design and evaluation; the current specification governs implementation.
Cite this report
Imran Siddique. Acceptance Before Export: A Bounded Evidence Contract for Governance Telemetry. AgenTrust technical report, version 1, 2026.
Download BibTeX / Download CITATION.cff
@techreport{agentrust2026telemetryevidenceacceptance,
title = {Acceptance Before Export: A Bounded Evidence Contract for Governance Telemetry},
author = {Imran Siddique},
institution = {AgenTrust},
year = {2026},
type = {Technical report},
note = {Version 1; not peer reviewed},
url = {https://agentrust-io.com/research/telemetry-evidence-acceptance/v1/}
}
Version history
Version 1, September 27, 2026: Adds the rerun, a later-revision probe result, a comparison with prior logging systems in place of the filing notes, and corrected patent and RFC references.
Revises a manuscript dated September 4, 2026.
File checksums. Published version files are retained; substantive revisions receive a new version.
Questions and corrections
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