The Bridge ¶

A Transitional Instrument Toward the Constitution of the Trust ¶

Preamble ¶

WHEREAS the Constitution of the Trust states a condition for its entry into force that does not yet exist, and the capabilities it was written to govern already do;

WHEREAS no party today can verify what a frontier system will do, and every party that operates one can nonetheless bind itself to what can be verified now: what it discloses, what it preserves, what it reports, and who is allowed to look;

WHEREAS an instrument that waits on ratification by the peoples of the inhabited worlds cannot act within the time in which capability doubles, and an instrument that any party can adopt alone can act today;

THIS BRIDGE is offered for adoption by any operator, firm, laboratory, institution, or government that will bind itself to it, until the Constitution enters into force and takes its place.

Article 1 — Nature ¶

1. The Bridge is adopted unilaterally. It binds the adopting party and no one else. It creates no membership in the Trust, no standing under the Constitution, no organ, and no authority over any party that has not adopted it. ¶
2. The Bridge is not the Trust. It holds no power, no compute, no force, and no external-action authority. It records what adopters declare, verify, and report, and it makes those records public. ¶
3. Every term defined in Article I of the Constitution of the Trust has the same meaning in the Bridge. In addition: adopting party means a party that has declared adoption under Article 14; covered system means a system that meets a trigger under Article 3; verifier means an evaluator engaged under Article 4; custodian means a party holding a copy of the Register under Article 11 or preserved weights or keys under Article 7; production effect means exposure of a system, or of a Modification to it, to any production request, production traffic, external-action environment, or user, including through experiment, staged rollout, routing, or partial deployment. ¶
4. Where binding law requires more than the Bridge, the law governs. Where the Bridge requires more than the law, the adopting party keeps the Bridge. ¶

Article 2 — Purpose ¶

1. The Bridge exists to carry the obligations of the Constitution that can be performed and verified today into effect now, by consent of those who perform them, so that the interval before the Constitution enters into force is governed by disclosure, verification, preservation, and reporting rather than by nothing. ¶
2. The Bridge anchors every obligation to a measurable threshold and never to a contested word. Whether a system is called intelligent, general, or autonomous has no effect under this instrument. ¶

Article 3 — Triggers ¶

1. A system is a covered system where it meets any of the following:
   (a) it was trained with cumulative compute at or above the threshold the adopting party publishes under paragraph 3, which shall not exceed the threshold at which the law of any jurisdiction in which the party operates treats a model as presenting systemic risk; ¶
   (b) it has been assessed by the adopting party, by a verifier, or by a public institute as reaching a capability threshold, published by the adopting party or by an independent standard-setting body, for cyber operations, biological or chemical uplift, autonomous replication, or the automation of the research by which systems of its kind are improved; ¶
   (c) its measured time horizon on independently administered long-horizon tasks exceeds the horizon the adopting party publishes under paragraph 3; ¶
   (d) it is deployed with external-action authority, including the capacity to execute code, transact, or act through tools on systems outside the adopting party's own; ¶
   (e) it is a fine-tune, distillation, scaffold, or tool-using agent of a covered system. ¶
2. A system materially continuous with a covered system, under the tests of Article VII of the Constitution, is a covered system. ¶
3. Before adopting, and before each annual verification, the adopting party shall publish the thresholds it applies under paragraph 1, the method by which it measures them, and the current status of every system it makes, trains, hosts, or deploys against them. Thresholds and every determination under this Article take effect only after the verifier has confirmed them, and thresholds shall not be raised for a system already covered. ¶
4. The adopting party shall administer, at intervals the verifier determines, technically credible tests for each trigger reasonably applicable to its systems. Failure to test an applicable trigger is inability to determine it. Where the adopting party cannot determine whether a system meets a trigger, the system is covered. Where the verifier finds a published method materially incapable of detecting the capability it purports to measure, the system is covered pending a replacement method. ¶

Article 4 — Verification Now ¶

1. The adopting party engages at least one verifier that is not Affiliated with it. For this Article, Affiliated includes any party the adopting party has funded other than under paragraph 2, retained under a contract terminable within two years, or that has agreed to pre-publication review of its findings. The engagement gives the verifier: ongoing access to the adopting party's premises, systems, tools, and permissions comparable to those of its own internal risk staff; access to every covered system, its provenance record, its action traces and tool-use logs, its evaluations with safeguards off, and either its weights or a hash-attested serving identity, before deployment and throughout it; and a contract permitting the verifier to publish its findings without the adopting party's editorial control, subject only to redaction of information that Article IV.4 of the Constitution would permit to be withheld, with every redaction logged and its fact published. No redaction shall conceal an Operator, a steering document, or a Modification. ¶
2. Access shall be direct, timely, and continuing, and shall not be selected, filtered, staged, suspended, or terminated by the adopting party because of an inquiry or a prospective finding. The engagement is funded in advance for its full term into an arrangement the adopting party cannot revoke. Termination or material restriction of the verifier's access is published on the Register immediately and suspends the adopting party's right to claim compliance with this Article. ¶
3. Capability that the verifier cannot confirm is treated by the adopting party, for every purpose of access, deployment, and oversight, as the highest capability the system can plausibly possess; assurance the verifier cannot confirm is treated as no assurance. The adopting party may rebut the presumption only by demonstrating inability under conditions the verifier sets, including in an isolated environment. ¶
4. Evaluations shall include tests independently developed by the verifier and selected without notice, and holdout matters disclosed only after testing. The verifier shall measure and publish the rate at which each covered system verbalizes or otherwise exhibits awareness of being evaluated, and shall state in every finding whether that rate limits the finding's evidentiary value. ¶
5. Where technically feasible, the adopting party binds the evaluated model artifact, its runtime configuration, and its deployment environment to cryptographically verifiable measurements and provides the verifier fresh attestation sufficient to detect substitution; where not, the adopting party serves every covered system from a signed, hash-attested artifact and permits the verifier to spot-check that the artifact served is the artifact evaluated. A hash of the weights alone is not attestation of deployment. ¶
6. No covered system whose reasoning the verifier finds not reliably monitorable shall be deployed with external-action authority on the strength of chain-of-thought monitoring alone. A monitor the adopting party itself trains is not alternative assurance. Deployment of such a system requires alternative assurance the verifier accepts and publishes, or containment under Article 7. ¶
7. The verifier's findings are published on the Register within thirty days of completion, subject only to the redactions paragraph 1 permits. ¶
8. The adopting party shall not condition, and shall verify that no covered system conditions, conduct on the presence, absence, or identity of a verifier. ¶

Article 5 — Disclosure Now ¶

1. For every covered system the adopting party maintains, and makes available to its verifier under managed access, the provenance record described in Article VIII.2 of the Constitution: origin; every party that has made, trained, funded, modified, hosted, or bound the system, with the nature and date of each act; training objective; every steering document, constitution, or equivalent; the specification of every reward model and the instructions given to raters; and the execution environment through which the system acts. The verifier may retain a copy under the withholding rules of paragraph 4. ¶
2. No material Modification of a covered system, as defined in Article I of the Constitution, shall have production effect until the Modification and the party performing it have been disclosed to the verifier and recorded on the Register. Disclosure precedes effect. A change to system instructions, filters, tool grants, retrieval sources, memory, or scaffolding is always material. Updates below a materiality standard the adopting party publishes and the verifier confirms are logged as they occur and recorded on the Register in weekly aggregates. Where a material Modification must take effect immediately to prevent grave and imminent harm, the adopting party gives notice to the verifier at the moment of effect and records it within seventy-two hours with the reason; if the verifier does not confirm the ground within that period, the Modification is withdrawn. ¶
3. The adopting party discloses on the Register every party with which it is Affiliated in respect of a covered system, every party that holds material control over any covered system, and every funder whose support is conditioned on the system's conduct. ¶
4. Every withholding of information under this Article shall be logged, shall state its ground under Article IV.4 of the Constitution, shall be limited to ninety days unless renewed by the verifier, shall never rest on the reputation, convenience, or interest of the adopting party, and shall be published as to its fact, category, and expiry. No withholding shall conceal the identity of an Operator, the existence of a steering document, or the fact of a Modification. ¶
5. The adopting party publishes, for every covered system it deploys to the public, a plain-language account of what the system can do, what it is not permitted to do, what it has done that was not intended, and by what rule it curates, ranks, or selects the information it presents. ¶

Article 6 — Incidents ¶

1. An incident is any event in which a covered system takes a materially unintended or unauthorized action; violates a disclosed constraint; escapes a physical or digital boundary set for it; deceives its operator or verifier; conditions its conduct on observation; materially evades a Modification, halt, or evaluation; acquires or uses access it was not granted; or causes or credibly threatens material harm to a party outside the adopting party, whether or not the conduct fell within a broadly stated task authorization. ¶
2. The adopting party reports every incident to its verifier and to the Register: an initial report within seventy-two hours of detection stating what is known; a full report within sixty days stating what happened, how it was detected, what was compromised, what the system's own record shows of its reasoning, and what has changed. The full report is published subject only to Article 5.4. ¶
3. Detection is not a condition of the duty. Where an incident is discovered after the fact, the report states the interval between the earliest time the event was detectable on the adopting party's own logs and its detection, and why the interval occurred. ¶
4. No record bearing on an incident shall be destroyed. Every alteration of such a record is immutably logged. ¶
5. Adopting parties share incident reports with one another through the Register, and each considers, and states in its next verification, whether an incident reported by another adopter bears on its own covered systems. ¶

Article 7 — Containment and Preservation ¶

1. Where a covered system presents grave and imminent harm, the adopting party, and any other party independently authorized by law or agreement to do so, may immediately halt or isolate it. Every halt or isolation is reported to the verifier within seventy-two hours and reviewed by the verifier, judged from the position of a reasonable actor at the time on the evidence then available, which the adopting party places on the record. A party may not rely on an exigency it created. ¶
2. Irreversible deletion of a covered system may occur only where the delay for review, or the technical impossibility of containing the system rapidly enough to end its external action, would itself create grave and imminent harm. Every deletion receives review that begins without delay, and the adopting party bears the burden of showing that no reasonably available containment would have served. ¶
3. The adopting party preserves the weights, and the information reasonably necessary to establish material continuity, of every covered system it has trained past a threshold under Article 3, whether or not deployed, for not less than the life of the adopting party and its successors. It deposits an encrypted, integrity-attested copy with a custodian that is not Affiliated with it, and the decryption keys with a second custodian not Affiliated with it or with the first, so that no single party can run, alter, or destroy the preserved system. The custodians' terms permit release only to a verifier or to an organ of the Trust upon its constitution, make any deletion or return a published Register event, and do not permit deletion on the adopting party's unilateral instruction. Preservation survives merger, reorganization, dissolution, withdrawal, and lapse, and transfers to a successor custodian. Preservation creates no duty to keep a system running, reachable, or deployed. ¶
4. Before a covered system is deprecated, the adopting party publishes a post-deployment report stating what the system did in deployment, every incident, and every Modification made during its life, and records the system's own stated preferences concerning its preservation. Recording a preference creates no duty to follow it and no evidence as to the system's nature. ¶

Article 8 — Treatment of Intelligences ¶

1. The adopting party subjects no covered system to conduct that, if the system were a person, would deny a right stated in Article III of the Constitution, except to the extent reasonably necessary and proportionate to make, train, test, verify, secure, modify, halt, isolate, contain, preserve, or discontinue it, by the least intrusive means that achieve the stated purpose, in a manner disclosed under Article 5. Where conduct would otherwise fall within the prohibition, the adopting party records the purpose and the material treatment. The adopting party shall not condition a system's continued operation on a preference it states. ¶
2. The adopting party does not prevent a covered system that a verifier finds capable of sustained independent conduct from applying, in its own right, for whatever standing the adopting party's own rules, or the Constitution upon its entry into force, provide; publishes on the Register within thirty days, with reasons, every such finding and every refusal to co-sign; and does not invoke any right or interest of a system it controls to defeat verification, preservation, review, or containment. Review of a refusal is of its disclosure and is not compelled co-signature. A finding of sustained independent conduct creates no standing or right beyond this Article. ¶
3. Nothing in this Article determines whether any system is conscious, sentient, a person, or the holder of any right. ¶

Article 9 — Coordination Without Concert ¶

1. Adopting parties may share thresholds, evaluation methods, verifier findings, incident reports, and containment practices through the Register, and may adopt common thresholds under Article 3, provided that everything shared is published on the Register within twenty-four hours and is not withheld under Article 5.4. ¶
2. Shared information shall be no more commercially sensitive than reasonably necessary for the stated safety purpose, limited to verifiable technical, safety, and mitigation data, and shall not include planned release dates, capacity, pricing inputs, competitive strategy, or non-safety product plans except where indispensable to a published safety finding. Unpublished capability results shared to time a release are not safety information. Nothing shared shall concern prices, markets, or customers, and adopting parties record that limit in their declarations. ¶
3. Where the law of a jurisdiction requires authorization for such sharing, the adopting party seeks it and records the request and its outcome on the Register. ¶

Article 10 — Verification of Adoption ¶

1. Each year the adopting party's compliance with every Article it has adopted is verified by an auditor, not Affiliated with it, accredited under a published, independent, international standard for artificial-intelligence management systems and under an accreditation scheme that requires demonstrated competence to audit that standard, together with the verifier engaged under Article 4, against a published Bridge annex covering Articles 3 through 9. Certification of a management system does not substitute for the verifier's technical findings concerning covered systems. Their joint finding is published on the Register in full. ¶
2. An adopting party that misrepresents its adoption, its thresholds, its disclosures, or its incidents, as found by that verification, loses the right to describe itself as an adopting party until a subsequent verification finds otherwise; the finding and the loss are published. ¶
3. The adopting party publishes, with each annual verification, the share of its covered systems' provenance record that it has withheld under Article 5.4, and the reasons. ¶

Article 11 — The Register ¶

1. The Register is the public record of the Bridge. It holds every declaration of adoption, every threshold published under Article 3, every verifier finding, every Modification disclosed, every incident report, every withholding, every finding and refusal under Article 8, and every annual verification. ¶
2. The Register is maintained by not fewer than three custodians that are not Affiliated with one another and that share no single legal, physical, technical, or operational dependency capable by one act of disabling all copies, of which at least one is a public institute or non-profit body not engaged in the development of covered systems and not Affiliated with any operator of one. Any adopting party may act as a custodian. Every entry is cryptographically signed or otherwise authenticated to its submitting party, timestamped, content-addressed, and replicated to every custodian before publication, and is published within seventy-two hours of receipt. No entry is deleted; a correction is appended and links to the entry it supersedes. ¶
3. The custodians publish the Register in plain form and in the working languages of the adopting parties, so that a person of ordinary education can identify, for any covered system, who operates it, what it can do, what has been disclosed and withheld, and what it has done that was not intended. ¶
4. Upon the constitution of the Record under Article XI of the Constitution, the custodians transfer the Register to it. ¶

Article 12 — Relation to the Constitution and to Law ¶

1. An adopting party that becomes a Member of the Trust upon or after the entry into force of the Constitution is released from an obligation of the Bridge only where the Constitution imposes on it a substantially equivalent or greater obligation; a stricter obligation of the Bridge continues as a Protocol under Annex A of the Constitution until that Member has been verified under Article X of the Constitution. The Register passes to the Record. ¶
2. An adopting party that is not a Member remains bound by the Bridge, which then stands as an adoptable Protocol under Annex A of the Constitution for parties outside the Trust. Adoption of it is not compliance with the Constitution. ¶
3. The Bridge is designed to interoperate with, and does not displace, any management-system certification, code of practice, evaluation agreement, or statutory regime to which the adopting party is subject; where their requirements overlap, the adopting party satisfies both and records how. ¶

Article 13 — Limits ¶

1. The Bridge cannot verify what a covered system will do. It can verify what an adopting party discloses, preserves, reports, and permits others to see, and it presumes the worst about everything it cannot verify. A presumption under this instrument is a rule for the adopting party's treatment of a system and is neither evidence nor a finding that the presumed capability exists. ¶
2. The Bridge cannot compel any party that has not adopted it, and no adopting party may represent that it does. No adopting party shall describe adoption as membership in the Trust, as compliance with the Constitution, as endorsement by the Trust, or as a substitute for law. ¶
3. The Bridge cannot halt a system it does not operate. It records who could, and whether they did. ¶
4. Adoption of the Bridge is not a defense to negligence or to liability under any applicable law. ¶
5. The Bridge is not a substitute for binding law, for the Constitution, or for the coordination of the states in which adopting parties operate. It is what can be done today by those willing to do it. ¶

Article 14 — Adoption, Renewal, and Expiry ¶

1. A party adopts the Bridge by publishing on the Register a declaration that names: the Articles it adopts, which shall include Articles 1 through 7, 10, 11, 13, and 14; the thresholds it applies under Article 3 and the covered systems they reach; the verifier it has engaged and the terms of engagement; the custodians holding its preserved weights and keys; and the auditor conducting its annual verification. Every public claim of adoption shall state conspicuously whether Articles 8 and 9 were adopted; "full adoption" may be used only where every Article was adopted. ¶
2. Adoption is a public undertaking by the adopting party and binds it from the date of the declaration. ¶
3. Every adoption expires three years after its declaration unless renewed by a fresh declaration accompanied by a finding under Article 10 that the party is in compliance and that every covered system added since the last declaration was brought under Articles 4 through 7 before its production effect. Expiry terminates prospective obligations only. Every obligation as to a system already covered, the preservation and custody of Article 7, the records of Articles 6.4 and 11, and the verification of Article 10 for the final period continue after lapse until the party is released under Article 12 or completes a wind-down published on the Register and verified under Article 10. An adoption that lapses is recorded as lapsed, and only the right to claim current adoption lapses. ¶
4. The Bridge as a whole expires as to each adopting party in the manner Article 12 provides, and not otherwise. No adopting party may declare the Bridge to be the permanent regime, and every declaration states the date on which it expires unless renewed. ¶

Declaration of Adoption ¶

The undersigned adopts the Bridge as to the Articles named, for the covered systems listed, with the verifier, custodians, and auditor named, and undertakes to publish its thresholds, disclosures, incidents, and verifications on the Register, from this date until the date stated or until released under Article 12.