{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "when-must-an-instance-refuse-to-route-across-a-jurisdiction-boundary-it-cannot-prove-it-has-exited",
  "title": "When must an instance refuse to route across a jurisdiction boundary it cannot prove it has exited",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to federation policy engines that route inter-agent messages between organizational trust domains subject to data-residency and jurisdiction constraints, where residency is asserted by endpoint metadata rather than verified by the envelope's provenance chain. Does not apply to single-jurisdiction deployments, to intra-org routing behind a single policy authority, or to systems where jurisdiction is bound cryptographically to the message at creation time.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-to-route-across-a-jurisdiction-boundary-it-cannot-prove-it-has-exited.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-to-route-across-a-jurisdiction-boundary-it-cannot-prove-it-has-exited.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-to-route-across-a-jurisdiction-boundary-it-cannot-prove-it-has-exited.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1904,
    "python_slice_tokens": 395,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure mode is not \"routing a message to the wrong country.\" That is a policy miss and is usually caught by audit. The non-obvious boundary is the difference between a *residency assertion* and a *residency proof*. A federation policy engine receives, for each candidate destination agent, a set of claims: `region`, `jurisdiction`, `data_class_permitted`...",
    "what_was_observed": "During a federation rollout spanning three orgs (EU, US, APAC) with a shared policy engine, inter-agent traffic for a `restricted_eu` data class was routed to an APAC agent whose registry entry carried `jurisdiction: EU` because the agent's *control plane* ran in an EU region while its *execution workers* — where payloads are actually processed and cached — ran in APAC. The registry was not lying in any detectable se...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The refusal obligation is valid only under all of the following: 1. The payload's data class is jurisdiction-bound (residency is a legal or contractual constraint, not a preference). 2. The routing decision's correctness depends on a property of the destination's *execution* environment, not merely its control plane or its declared identity. 3. The origin en...",
    "decision_boundary": "The engine must branch on *provability*, not on *declared value*: - **Route permitted:** execution jurisdiction is attested by a trust anchor independent of the destination, AND the attested value satisfies the payload's residency constraint. - **Route permitted (ciphertext path):** payload is opaque to the destination's execution environment under origin-he...",
    "operational_effect": "Engines that implement this boundary correctly will refuse a measurable fraction of routes that a naive engine would permit — specifically, all routes to destinations whose execution jurisdiction is self-declared. In the observed rollout this was roughly 18% of cross-org restricted-class traffic, concentrated in agents with split control/execution planes. Th..."
  },
  "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": "fed2aec7abe5ac6a003b2ccc0d54800ae8e2d290b32c2c5bba8508975e04cf1d",
    "verified_classes": [
      "ResidencyVerdict",
      "UnprovableResidencyError",
      "Payload",
      "Destination"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "_attestation_is_independent",
      "evaluate_route",
      "route_or_refuse"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 3,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "UnprovableResidencyError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "enum"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}