Epistemic Separation
Generation is not certification.
No LLM, autonomous agent, memory system or heuristic receives epistemic authority merely because it generated, selected or stored a claim.
NORMATIVE TEXT
The CCAI Charter
CCAI Charter — Version 1.0
The Charter is the normative definition of Cumulative Certified Autonomous Intelligence (CCAI). Where explanatory material and the Charter differ, the Charter governs.
Each article has a stable anchor, e.g. /charter#article-i. Explanatory material lives on the main page.
Independent Verification
A claim can acquire certified status only through an independent verification procedure appropriate to that claim.
The authority that determines certification must be independent from the act of proposing the claim.
The verification mechanism and the rules governing certification must be explicitly identifiable and auditable.
Explicit Abstention
When evidence is insufficient to establish or refute a claim, the system must be able to abstain.
Uncertainty must never be silently converted into certainty.
Epistemic State
Knowledge must carry an explicit epistemic status.
Observed, discovered, hypothetical and established information must not be silently conflated.
Provenance
Every material claim must retain sufficient provenance to determine where it came from, what evidence supported it, how it was transformed and how its status was obtained.
Forensic Traceability
Certification decisions must be reconstructable.
The system should preserve the evidence, transformations, tests, decisions and relevant machine actions necessary to audit the path to an epistemic outcome.
Cumulative Memory
Established knowledge may persist beyond the investigation in which it was obtained.
Memory is not merely conversation history. It is structured scientific or epistemic material available for subsequent investigation.
Composition
Previously established knowledge may be combined to construct new candidate relations, representations, hypotheses or tests.
Composition does not itself confer certification. Composed claims must undergo verification.
Reusability
Knowledge should be represented with enough context, provenance, support and epistemic status to permit justified reuse across later investigations where applicable.
Non-Forced Conclusion
A CCAI system must not force a relation, orientation, mechanism or causal conclusion merely because a result is expected or desirable.
Absence of sufficient evidence must remain visible.
Causal Restraint
Association, exact relation, prediction and causal identification are distinct claims.
Causal status must not be assigned unless the available evidence and applicable identification procedure justify it.
Deterministic Authority
Where certification is defined by deterministic rules, generative or statistical components may assist discovery but must not override those certification rules.
The authority boundary must remain explicit.
Recomputability
Where underlying evidence, established knowledge or relevant context changes, dependent conclusions must be capable of being recomputed and their status reconsidered.
Auditability
A third party examining the retained evidence and rules should be able, in principle, to understand why a claim received its epistemic status.
Knowledge over Output
The durable product of an investigation is not merely a generated answer.
It is the body of traceable knowledge that survives verification and can participate in future investigation.
End of the CCAI Charter, Version 1.0.