Authority

Authority answers two different questions:

1. What may this source establish?
2. What may this actor cause the system to do?

Conflating them lets a credible source become an operator, or a powerful operator make unsupported claims true.

Source authority

TM-AUT-001 — Scoped source authority. Every source used to support current truth MUST have an authority scope no broader than the claims it is entitled to establish.

TM-AUT-002 — No authority by location. A source MUST NOT gain universal authority because it is called a system of record, is important, is recent, or stores a value in a canonical repository.

TM-AUT-003 — Conflicting sources. When differently authoritative sources conflict, reconciliation MUST preserve the conflict or record the reviewed reason one claim governs the current value. It MUST NOT silently choose by recency, confidence, or ingestion order unless that rule is itself declared and authorized.

Actor authority

TM-AUT-004 — Declared actor capabilities. The implementation MUST declare which actors may inspect, draft, review, accept, apply, publish, communicate, or operate within the coherence boundary.

TM-AUT-005 — Review responsibility. Every accepted consequential change MUST identify the authority responsible for the reviewed judgment. A service or AI Peer may be the actor performing mechanical application without becoming the reviewing authority.

TM-AUT-006 — Exact delegation. Delegation MUST state the delegating authority, delegate, capability, scope, and applicable conditions. Delegation MUST NOT be inferred from tool access or prior convenience.

TM-AUT-007 — No self-expansion. An actor MUST NOT expand its own authority through the same capability being expanded. The expansion requires the review path already authorized to make that change.

AI Peers

An AI Peer may inspect broad context, compare evidence, draft changes, explain consequences, and invoke deterministic tools within its declared authority. Model confidence, reasoning quality, continuous presence, or operator trust do not create authority.

TM-AUT-008 — Model results are claims. A model-produced extraction, classification, recommendation, or conclusion MUST enter the system as a derivative claim or proposed work unless an independently authorized, deterministic rule establishes otherwise.