Baselines and drift

Attestation is always attestation against something. This page covers the something — the declared behavioral baseline — and the three event families that fall out when production behavior departs from it.

The declared baseline

At deployment, the customer declares a behavioral baseline: the parameters of what the AI system is supposed to do — its scope, its controls, the boundaries of acceptable output. The Control Platform then attests every governed inference against that declaration. GROUNDED · Brochure

The baseline does double duty:

1. Technically, it is the reference the Scan step compares against — no baseline, nothing to attest.
2. Contractually, it is the anchor for the liability shift from section 17: the burden of proof landing on deployers is precisely the burden of showing the system “was operating within declared parameters at the time of a loss.” A declared, attested baseline is that proof, manufactured continuously. GROUNDED · Brochure

In the customer-facing product vocabulary, the authored-and-published form of a baseline plus its controls is called a Charter. GROUNDED · Labs

Three trigger-grade event families

When production departs from the declaration, the departure surfaces as an event — “in real time, independently of the vendor’s own reporting.” That independence clause is the whole point: the signal an underwriter prices on cannot be the vendor’s self-assessment. GROUNDED · Brochure

Event	What it means	Why an underwriter cares
Drift	Measured deviation of production behavior from the declared baseline, sustained over time	The risk being carried is no longer the risk that was priced
Scope exceedance	The system did (or tried to do) something outside its declared scope	The discrete precursor of a liability event
Version change	The underlying model changed beneath the deployment	The accumulation problem’s correlation signal — one upstream update, visible across every attested deployment

These are called trigger-grade because they are the raw material of the parametric structure: the draft trigger mechanism is “sustained behavioral drift or scope exceedance beyond a defined threshold, over a rolling 30-day attested window” — countable events, over an attested denominator, over a defined period. GROUNDED · Brochure The trigger design itself (thresholds, windows, basis risk) is section 20-00.

Contrast this with the underwriter’s rejection in the missing denominator: vague KPIs carry basis risk; certificates expire. A counted event stream against a declared baseline is the shape he said he could price. GROUNDED · KB

The Block function: control, not just evidence

The Enforce step does not merely record scope exceedance — it intercepts non-compliant outputs before they reach the end user. The draft’s phrasing: “actively reducing loss frequency at the inference boundary,” making Inference Re “both the evidence layer and the risk-control layer for every policy written on top of it.” GROUNDED · Brochure

In Volume 1 terms, this is why the flywheel turns: evidence alone improves selection; a control that blocks bad outputs improves the risk itself. Loss frequency falls on the governed paths, the loss ratio improves for a real reason, and the premium credit is defensible rather than promotional. A sprinkler system, not a smoke report. STABLE

One honesty note, load-bearing for the sales floor: blocking applies to request/response decisions the Arbiter mediates. For streaming output, the honest verbs are observe and truncate, never “prevention” — you cannot un-send a token. GROUNDED · Labs

What the baseline is not

• It is not a certification. Certificates attest a process at a point in time; the baseline is attested against at every inference. GROUNDED · Brochure
• It is not universal. It governs mediated paths only — a deployment can always run traffic around the proxy, and the evidence will honestly say nothing about it (the scope discipline of 19-02). GROUNDED · Labs
• It is not static forever. Baselines are versioned and re-declared as scope legitimately changes — drift is deviation from the current declaration, not from history. GROUNDED · Labs

Every attested comparison against the baseline produces a record. What makes that record trustworthy to a third party — rather than just another vendor log — is the next page.

Next

→ 02 Receipts and the Notary

Drill this page →13 bank questions stand behind what you just read. Check it while it’s warm.