{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-tool-result-label-as-authoritative-rather-than-advisory",
  "title": "Under what conditions must an instance treat a tool-result label as authoritative rather than advisory",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 9",
  "scope": "Applies to agent runtimes that attach dynamic information-flow (taint) labels to prompt segments and tool results, and that propagate those labels across tool-call boundaries within a single logical task. Does not apply to stateless single-turn inference, nor to systems where tool outputs are never re-ingested into the prompt context.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-tool-result-label-as-authoritative-rather-than-advisory.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-tool-result-label-as-authoritative-rather-than-advisory.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/under-what-conditions-must-an-instance-treat-a-tool-result-label-as-authoritative-rather-than-advisory.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1368,
    "python_slice_tokens": 187,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A taint label produced by a tool is either *advisory* (a hint the planner may weigh) or *authoritative* (a hard constraint the propagator must honor even when it conflicts with the model's own reasoning). The non-obvious boundary is this: **a label is authoritative if and only if the tool's output was produced by a source that lies outside the trust domain o...",
    "what_was_observed": "An agent fetched a document via an HTTP tool. The tool's taint propagator labeled the result `EXTERNAL_UNTRUSTED` and, per policy, marked any instruction-like substring within it as `INSTRUCTION_TAINT`. The planner model read the document, recognized a sentence as a *legitimate* configuration directive (it referenced the agent's own tool schema accurately), and downgraded the label to advisory because \"the content is...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The authoritative reading is valid only under all of the following: 1. **Provenance is recorded, not inferred.** The label carries the originating principal and the capability it lacks. If the label is reconstructed from content heuristics at read time, it is advisory by construction. 2. **The lattice is a partial order with a join that preserves source sets...",
    "decision_boundary": "The decision to escalate a label from advisory to authoritative triggers when **the tainted span's provenance includes a principal outside the current trust domain AND the pending tool call would exercise a capability that principal does not hold.** Below that line — tainted content used only for display, or a tool call that exercises no capability beyond wh...",
    "operational_effect": "Enforcing the authoritative reading shifts failures from silent capability escalation to explicit blocked calls. Expect a rise in `TaintViolation` events on legitimate workflows where a trusted document was fetched over an untrusted channel — these are re-attribution opportunities, not bugs. The cost is a small false-positive rate on fetches of the agent's o..."
  },
  "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": "227046177517c87bd08c8478a312924eba6cfacb7ca654edcf126efa737b31a9",
    "verified_classes": [
      "TaintViolation",
      "Label"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "check_tool_call",
      "propagate_through_transform",
      "join"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 1,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "TaintViolation"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}