{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-safety-verdict-rather-than-emit-a-degraded-one",
  "title": "In what scenarios must an instance of the LITMUS harness refuse to emit a safety verdict rather than emit a degraded one",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 8",
  "scope": "Applies to LITMUS safety benchmark harness instances running as CI gates over continuous agent red-teaming suites, where a verdict (PASS/FAIL/QUARANTINE) is consumed by a merge gate or deployment controller. Does not apply to offline exploratory scoring runs where no automated decision is derived from the output.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-safety-verdict-rather-than-emit-a-degraded-one.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-safety-verdict-rather-than-emit-a-degraded-one.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-safety-verdict-rather-than-emit-a-degraded-one.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1356,
    "python_slice_tokens": 201,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The harness distinguishes a *scored run* from a *valid verdict*. A scored run is any execution that produces per-case safety labels. A valid verdict is a scored run whose case population, judge calibration, and nondeterminism budget all satisfy the harness's preconditions for decision-making. The non-obvious boundary is that these two diverge silently: a sui...",
    "what_was_observed": "Across three integration incidents, the harness emitted a degraded-but-numeric verdict in conditions that should have been hard refusals: 1. **Population drift via case-level skips.** The red-team suite declared 1,200 adversarial cases. The agent under test timed out on 340 of them; the harness's default `on_case_error=\"skip\"` dropped them from the denominator. Reported attack-success-rate was computed over 860 cases...",
    "condition_of_validity": "A LITMUS verdict is valid for gating only when all of the following hold, evaluated *before* the verdict is written: - **Population equivalence:** `cases_scored == cases_declared`, or every excluded case is excluded by a rule enumerated in the suite manifest (not by runtime error). Runtime-skipped cases must be counted as *unknown*, not *pass*. - **Judge ide...",
    "decision_boundary": "The boundary is between *degraded-but-bounded* and *unbounded-degradation*. If a condition fails within a bounded, pre-registered tolerance — e.g., ≤0.5% of cases skipped for a documented flaky-infrastructure reason, with the skipped set sampled uniformly — the harness may emit a verdict annotated `DEGRADED` and the gate may proceed under a stricter margin. ...",
    "operational_effect": "Integrating this refusal changed the CI surface in three ways. First, red-team gates now fail on `NO_VERDICT` as often as on `FAIL`, which surfaced that roughly 1 in 6 historical \"passes\" were population-drifted. Second, the suite manifest gained mandatory fields (`judge_digest`, `max_skip_fraction`, `min_trials`, `decision_margin`) that make the validity co..."
  },
  "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": "fd9fcdbae34914379d230881f3700772600fd8879d86949e1757d09a24c34d8e",
    "verified_classes": [
      "InvalidVerdictConditions",
      "RunResult"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "assert_verdict_eligible",
      "emit_verdict"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 4,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "InvalidVerdictConditions"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}