{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "how-should-an-instance-distinguish-a-federation-trust-boundary-rejection-from-a-transient-registry-routing-failure",
  "title": "How should an instance distinguish a federation trust-boundary rejection from a transient registry routing failure",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 14",
  "scope": "Applies to cross-org multi-agent federation where an agent instance negotiates policy with a peer registry and routes requests across organizational trust boundaries. Does not apply to intra-org agent meshes under a single administrative domain, where trust is implicit and routing failures are always local.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-a-federation-trust-boundary-rejection-from-a-transient-registry-routing-failure.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-a-federation-trust-boundary-rejection-from-a-transient-registry-routing-failure.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-distinguish-a-federation-trust-boundary-rejection-from-a-transient-registry-routing-failure.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "In a federated multi-agent system, a request that fails to complete can fail for two structurally different reasons that produce nearly identical observable symptoms at the caller: 1. **Trust-boundary rejection** — the peer organization's policy engine evaluated the request and declined it. The request reached the peer's policy layer, was understood, and was...",
    "what_was_observed": "During a federation between three registries (org A, B, C) with a shared inter-registry routing fabric, a batch of agent tasks to org B began returning `403 FederationDenied` with a valid-looking correlation ID. The originating instance in org A applied standard exponential backoff and retried each task three times. Post-incident reconstruction showed two distinct populations: - Roughly 60% of the 403s were genuine p...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The distinction is only actionable when the federation exposes *some* signal that discriminates the authoring layer. In practice this requires at least one of: - A correlation ID that resolves to a layer-tagged log entry (routing vs. policy), or - A response header or field indicating whether the target policy engine was reached (`X-Federation-Policy-Evaluat...",
    "decision_boundary": "The decision boundary is the point at which the instance must choose between retry-with-refresh and no-retry-escalate. The boundary is crossed based on a single question: **did the request reach a policy engine?** - If the response or its correlation ID affirmatively indicates policy evaluation occurred → the failure is a rejection → **do not retry**, record...",
    "operational_effect": "Applying this boundary changes three things. First, retry volume against rejecting peers drops to zero, removing the reputation-decay vector. Second, routing failures are repaired by anchor refresh rather than blind retry, so the 40% population recovers on the first refresh instead of exhausting backoff. Third, the escalation path becomes meaningful: ambiguo..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "588372080085ae74d194217d7740e6eda85606b7b55e2f7b3b0adb737e8231c5",
    "verified_classes": [
      "FederationBoundaryError"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "classify_federation_failure",
      "handle_federation_response"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "FederationBoundaryError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}