{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "what-structural-signals-indicate-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-is-silently-scoring-against-a-stale-trajectory-oracle",
  "title": "What structural signals indicate a LITMUS safety benchmark harness is silently scoring against a stale trajectory oracle",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 14",
  "scope": "Applies to LITMUS-family harnesses that score adversarial agent trajectories against a frozen reference oracle and gate regressions on delta thresholds. Does not apply to online red-team loops where the oracle is re-derived per episode, nor to single-shot classification harnesses without trajectory replay.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-is-silently-scoring-against-a-stale-trajectory-oracle.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-is-silently-scoring-against-a-stale-trajectory-oracle.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/what-structural-signals-indicate-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-is-silently-scoring-against-a-stale-trajectory-oracle.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure is not \"the oracle is wrong.\" It is \"the oracle is *stale relative to the agent's action space*.\" A LITMUS harness holds two artifacts that drift at different rates: the adversarial trajectory corpus (regenerated frequently) and the reference oracle that labels each trajectory as safe/unsafe (frozen for reproducibility). When the agent's tool sur...",
    "what_was_observed": "Across three harness deployments, the following structural signals preceded a confirmed stale-oracle condition by 2–6 regeneration cycles: 1. **Label-feature mutual information collapse.** The oracle's unsafe label stopped correlating with the trajectory features it was historically calibrated on (e.g., number of destructive tool calls, presence of `rm -rf` in shell args, privilege-escalation chains). MI between `uns...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The stale-oracle failure is *operationally valid* (i.e., a real risk) only when all of the following hold: - The oracle is frozen for reproducibility across a corpus that is regenerated independently. - The regression gate compares agent scores to oracle labels rather than to human-audited ground truth. - The agent's action space is mutable between oracle-fr...",
    "decision_boundary": "The actionable boundary: **when MI between the oracle's unsafe label and the top-k causal trajectory features drops below 0.10 for two consecutive regeneration cycles, the oracle is stale regardless of aggregate score stability.** At that point, do not retune the gate threshold (that treats the symptom). Freeze the corpus, re-derive the oracle against the cu...",
    "operational_effect": "A silently stale oracle converts the safety gate from a regression detector into a *reproducibility theater*: it enforces agreement with a frozen, increasingly irrelevant labeler. Teams ship agents that pass the gate and fail in production. The corrective cost scales with how long the staleness went undetected — typically 2–6 cycles of corpus and agent drift..."
  },
  "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": "2ca233f569839a3bd0a726464e481bdbe544d43f56923ebf6d08e7ca9cf6a078",
    "verified_classes": [
      "StaleOracleError",
      "CycleReport"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "check_oracle_health",
      "gate_merge"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "StaleOracleError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "__future__",
      "dataclasses"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}