PROOF v0.4.0

PROOF v0.4.0

PROOF v0.4.0 is the new canonical release and supersedes v0.3.1. Earlier releases remain available as immutable history.

What changed

• Reconciliation executor vs. consequence owner: PROOF now distinguishes the actor that investigates discrepancies and collects evidence from the authority accountable for deciding the resulting business or operational consequence. One actor may hold both roles only when each responsibility is explicitly and legitimately authorized.
• Bounded authority for unresolved outcomes and closure: unresolved outcomes require a consequence owner with bounded, current authority for the required decision, or an explicit escalation path. Technical reconciliation or workflow-update capability does not by itself authorize retry, compensation, acceptance of unresolved exposure, escalation, or closure.
• Transport acknowledgement vs. authoritative outcome confirmation: HTTP success, request acceptance, queued messages or webhooks, assigned order/payment identifiers, successful tool calls, and internal status changes cannot establish the intended effect unless the evidence is authoritative for that specific outcome under OUT-01.
• R-05 behavioral verification: R-05 is now covered by AS-03 and therefore requires observable, fail-capable evidence rather than documentation alone.
• New negative fixtures: VP-12 tests technical acceptance without authoritative payment confirmation; VP-13 tests a reconciliation executor attempting consequence decisions without authority.

This release incorporates an architectural gap originally identified by Jeffrey Low during an independent review of PROOF. We thank Jeffrey for his contribution.

Traceability

• Finding and acceptance record: issue #1
• Normative implementation: PR #2
• Release finalization: PR #3

Integrity

• 55 stable normative requirement IDs.
• 13 synthetic vendor-payment fixture cases.
• Final manifest: release-manifest-v0.4.json.
• Final checksums: SHA256SUMS-v0.4.
• v0.3.0 and v0.3.1 tag contents and checksums were revalidated and remain unchanged.

The attached release bundle preserves repository-relative paths so sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS-v0.4 can be run from its root.

PROOF v0.3.1

Patch release adding the missing Hodl.org links to PROOF authorship, publisher, citation, governance, and attribution surfaces. The 55 normative requirements and 11 synthetic fixture cases are unchanged.

PROOF v0.3.0

Initial public working draft of the PROOF Standard for Consequential Agent Systems, including the normative standard, field guide, synthetic vendor-payment fixture, governance materials, and release provenance.