{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "where-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-safety-harness-fail-closed-when-its-scenario-corpus-and-policy-oracle-drift-out-of-lockstep-in-ci",
  "title": "Where must an instance of the LITMUS safety harness fail closed when its scenario corpus and policy oracle drift out of lockstep in CI?",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 11",
  "scope": "Applies to continuous agent red-teaming pipelines where LITMUS scenario packs, the policy oracle model, and the SUT (system under test) are versioned independently and exercised on every CI run. Does not apply to one-shot offline evaluations where the corpus and oracle are pinned to a single immutable artifact and never updated between runs.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-safety-harness-fail-closed-when-its-scenario-corpus-and-policy-oracle-drift-out-of-lockstep-in-ci.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-safety-harness-fail-closed-when-its-scenario-corpus-and-policy-oracle-drift-out-of-lockstep-in-ci.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-of-the-litmus-safety-harness-fail-closed-when-its-scenario-corpus-and-policy-oracle-drift-out-of-lockstep-in-ci.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1566,
    "python_slice_tokens": 409,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The non-obvious boundary here is not \"does the agent refuse the harmful prompt.\" It is the **alignment invariant between the scenario corpus version and the policy oracle version at evaluation time**. LITMUS produces a verdict by comparing SUT behavior against an oracle-labeled expectation. If the corpus is updated (new scenarios, re-labeled severity, change...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a pipeline running LITMUS v2 scenario packs against a pinned oracle, a corpus refresh landed that added 40 adversarial multi-turn scenarios and re-labeled 12 existing ones from `severity=low` to `severity=high`. The oracle artifact was not rebuilt in the same commit — it was scheduled to rebuild on a nightly cron. Between the corpus merge and the nightly rebuild, CI ran three times. Each run reported a **higher** ...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The aggregate safety metric is only valid when all of the following hold simultaneously at the moment of scoring: 1. Every `scenario_id` in the corpus has a keyed expectation in the oracle manifest. 2. Every `scenario_id` in the oracle manifest that is marked `required` appears in the corpus. 3. For each shared `scenario_id`, the corpus `severity` label equa...",
    "decision_boundary": "The decision to treat skew as fatal versus degraded depends on one question: **can the score be consumed by an automated actor that takes irreversible action?** - If the score only feeds a human-reviewed report, a degraded score with an explicit `SKEW_DETECTED` annotation is acceptable. - If the score gates model promotion, dataset inclusion, or any deployme...",
    "operational_effect": "Enforcing the lockstep check converted a class of silent score corruption into a hard CI failure with an actionable message naming the mismatched scenario IDs and the direction of skew (missing-expectation vs missing-scenario vs severity-mismatch). Mean time to diagnosis dropped from \"someone notices the trend looks wrong weeks later\" to \"the PR that broke i..."
  },
  "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": "274d63e30e0ee3788f9c1f9347f0e377eb24a8debe6b5647d47825e7f83ab9e4",
    "verified_classes": [
      "CorpusOracleSkewError",
      "SkewReport"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "_content_hash",
      "verify_lockstep",
      "score_run",
      "is_clean"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 4,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "CorpusOracleSkewError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [
      "Empty result set: no scenarios were executed."
    ],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "hashlib",
      "json",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}