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Agent OS
AOS-VOL-05 Normative foundation

Volume 05: Legal and Compliance

Volume 05: Legal and Compliance: scope, decisions, requirements, evidence, risks, and traceability for the Agent OS programme.

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Volume 05: Legal and Compliance

This volume groups canonical documents by reader concern while tasks are scheduled through the separate nine-phase execution model.

Table of Contents

Purpose and Scope

Area: Documentation Programme.

This volume groups canonical documents by reader concern while tasks are scheduled through the separate nine-phase execution model.

This document owns the semantics implied by Volume 05: Legal and Compliance. It does not assert that every described subsystem already exists. It defines the target model, constraints, evidence needed to trust an implementation, and the boundary with adjacent documents.

Normative Position

  1. Classify every artifact by origin, license, confidentiality, redistribution, patent, export, privacy, and clean-room status.
  2. Obtain counsel review before restricted reverse-engineering, firmware redistribution, trademark launch, cellular certification, or vendor NDA work.
  3. Record jurisdiction, device ownership, contract terms, methods, people, inputs, outputs, and access controls.

Operating Model

The operating model is contract-first and evidence-driven. A component declares its authority, resources, lifecycle, error model, cancellation and timeout behavior, observability, version, and compatibility promise. Backends are replaceable only when the same conformance suite passes and no forbidden platform type leaks into portable layers.

Implementation proceeds through a reference model or mock, deterministic QEMU evidence where relevant, documentation-first physical hardware, and quality-hardware evidence. Pixel 9 adapters remain quarantined according to ADR-0004.

Requirements

  • R01. Classify every artifact by origin, license, confidentiality, redistribution, patent, export, privacy, and clean-room status.
  • R02. Obtain counsel review before restricted reverse-engineering, firmware redistribution, trademark launch, cellular certification, or vendor NDA work.
  • R03. Record jurisdiction, device ownership, contract terms, methods, people, inputs, outputs, and access controls.
  • R04. Specify normal, partial, denied, timeout, cancellation, restart, upgrade, and permanent-failure behavior.
  • R05. Expose structured diagnostics without leaking secrets or vendor-specific implementation details.
  • R06. Link material unknowns to a claim and, when testable, an experiment with an owner and gate.
  • R07. Update affected documentation and task data when evidence changes the model.

Failure and Degradation

Degradation must be explicit rather than accidental. The system reports capability absence, reduced quality, unavailable provider, stale data, or unsafe condition through typed states. It must not silently fall back to broader authority, unrestricted legacy execution, unverified firmware, lossy data migration, or irreversible agent action.

Recovery defines what state is retained, reconstructed, re-enrolled, compensated, or intentionally discarded. Unsupported hardware or providers are rejected at binding time where possible.

Evidence and Acceptance

  • Counsel-approved protocol or opinion scope.
  • Artifact provenance audit.
  • Release compliance checklist, SBOM and notices.
  • Evidence records target identity, hardware revision, firmware, source commit, toolchain, configuration, seed, timestamps, artifacts, expected result, actual result, and reviewer.
  • Acceptance requires the referenced tasks to meet their own criteria; prose completion is not implementation completion.

Implementation Obligations

No current task row references this document directly. Before implementation begins, create an owned task or explicitly mark the document as informational.

Risks and Open Questions

  • Interoperability exceptions are conditional and jurisdiction-specific.
  • A technical ability to extract or observe does not establish a right to publish or redistribute.
  • Public branding before clearance can create rework and liability.
  • Open-question rule: an unanswered high-impact question becomes a claim/experiment record and cannot be hidden in meeting notes.
  • Stop rule: work stops or changes track when legal rights, recovery, debug access, safety, or the required evidence path is unavailable.

Related Documents

Planning Reference Anchors

No additional task-specific anchors are required in this baseline.