{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-refuse-federated-policy-convergence-when-data-residency-constraints-are-only-satisfiable-through-transitive-delegat",
  "title": "In what scenarios must an instance refuse federated policy convergence when data residency constraints are only satisfiable through transitive delegation",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to cross-organization multi-agent federations where each participant enforces its own data residency policy and policy agreement is reached through iterative negotiation over shared artifacts (plans, intermediate results, or tool invocations). Does not apply to single-tenant deployments, to federations where all participants share a single jurisdictional trust domain, or to stateless request/response APIs that carry no derived artifacts.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-refuse-federated-policy-convergence-when-data-residency-constraints-are-only-satisfiable-through-transitive-delegat.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-refuse-federated-policy-convergence-when-data-residency-constraints-are-only-satisfiable-through-transitive-delegat.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-refuse-federated-policy-convergence-when-data-residency-constraints-are-only-satisfiable-through-transitive-delegat.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1679,
    "python_slice_tokens": 418,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The non-obvious boundary is between *policy convergence* and *residency satisfaction*. Most federation stacks treat these as the same event: when all parties' policy engines accept a proposed action, the negotiation terminates and the action executes. This is wrong in the presence of transitive delegation. A federation can reach a state where every individua...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-party federation (EU orchestrator, US sub-agent, US sub-sub-agent) running a document-summarization pipeline, the negotiation completed in 4 rounds with unanimous `ALLOW` at every engine. Post-hoc provenance reconstruction showed the EU-sourced document's embedding vector was stored in a US region for 11 minutes before the summarization completed. No policy engine had flagged it. The EU orchestrator's audi...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The refusal-to-converge rule is valid when *all* of the following hold: - The federation spans ≥2 jurisdictional trust domains with non-identical residency policies. - At least one delegation chain has depth ≥2 (i.e., a sub-agent itself delegates). - The intermediate agent performs a transformation that produces a new artifact rather than passing through an ...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational rule: **an instance must refuse to declare negotiation complete — and must raise, not return `ALLOW` — when the convergence predicate is satisfied but the artifact provenance graph contains at least one path whose source jurisdiction is not a superset-permitted destination under every constraint attached to the source artifact.** In practice ...",
    "operational_effect": "When the rule is applied, federations exhibit a characteristic behavior: negotiation rounds increase (typically 2–3× for depth-3 chains) because constraints must be re-attached and re-evaluated at each hop. The cost is latency and, occasionally, negotiation failure when an intermediate agent genuinely cannot satisfy the upstream constraint — which is the cor..."
  },
  "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": "abef40ced65f36bf2b9c3024397ed8048fbfd130a1feca758b6d9867dbc225d2",
    "verified_classes": [
      "ResidencyConvergenceError",
      "Artifact",
      "NegotiationState"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "_lineage_paths",
      "assert_residency_before_convergence"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "ResidencyConvergenceError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [
      "convergence precondition not met: at least one engine did not ALLOW"
    ],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "__future__",
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}