Apply GH-DEC-2026-015/016 and the audit-core registration; both blockers cleared

Origin and evidence path both landed today.

T07 origin: railiance-apps deployed decisions.coulomb.social and corrected the
hostname in this repo — not the decide.coulomb.social this workplan proposed.
Verified here rather than taken on report: both paths 200, TLS verify 0, Let's
Encrypt cert valid to 2026-12-09.

T08: audit-core registered the source with every field as proposed and landed
the detection half. INFD-IN-0003 closed. Their refinements booked — reconciliation
on the high-volume class too, since rate detects a stream stopping but never a
stream missing the particular renders that mattered, which is exactly our threat
model; and PR-12, the custody locator must be a stable non-secret identifier
because redact scans data and an existence declaration arriving without its
pointer looks complete while being useless.

INFD-IN-0004 ruled as GH-DEC-2026-015: gate-house reversed itself and nesting is
permitted for this pair. The decisive ground was not the cycle argument we led
with — our binding slice canonicalizes principal and target, two of the five
digest fields, so co-reference left us performing a partial recomputation of one
act in a second vocabulary, closer to the translation R3 forbade than nesting
is. Our ordering objection was withdrawn as mistaken.

The permission is conditioned and NOT ACTIVE until approval-engine states its
presentation exclusion as normative and tested. layer.yaml is deliberately
unchanged and carries nesting_permission_active false — we do not activate on
our own initiative.

GH-DEC-2026-016 ruled NC-03. Its §5 is live rather than hypothetical and is
booked as PR-11: principal_type: human is a property of the client registration,
structurally the same shape as the gap-route tenant, so a human-in-the-loop
control must not be discharged on it as verified humanity.

T07 stays progress: the submission to key-cape is written but unsent, blocked by
the local permission classifier rather than by any repository.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01V3W1dQG7GFFM9d94jFx7iR

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1565372@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 16bb2f25-b34c-49ef-8e94-5fec3567a568

docs/finding-r3-linkage-conflict.md

@@ -5,8 +5,18 @@
 **Intake:** `INFD-IN-0004`
 **Statute:** *"The statute governs on disagreement; a disagreement is a finding
 for `gate-house`."*
-**Status:** raised. **No design change made.** `GH-DEC-2026-012` R3 stands and
-`layer.yaml` is unchanged pending a ruling.
+**Status:** **Ruled `GH-DEC-2026-015` — nesting permitted for this pair,
+conditioned and not yet active.** `layer.yaml` remains unchanged: co-reference
+stays in force until `approval-engine` states its presentation exclusion as
+normative and tested. This repository does not activate on its own initiative.
+
+Gate House reversed itself, and gave the real ground rather than the one we
+argued: our binding slice canonicalizes `principal` and `target`, two of the
+five digest fields, so co-reference by identifier left us performing a partial
+recomputation of one act in a second vocabulary — **closer to the translation R3
+forbade than nesting is**. Our ordering-dependency objection was withdrawn as
+mistaken; `binding.digest` is over act material and is determined before anyone
+is presented anything.
 
 ---
 

docs/specs/EvidenceModel.md

@@ -199,8 +199,29 @@ five digest fields, so co-reference by identifier alone leaves **two
 independent canonicalizations of one act** rather than removing the duplication.
 
 Raised as a finding rather than resolved bilaterally
-(`docs/finding-r3-linkage-conflict.md`). **The ruling stands and nothing has
-changed here pending a re-ruling.**
+(`docs/finding-r3-linkage-conflict.md`). **Re-ruled by `GH-DEC-2026-015`:
+gate-house reversed itself — nesting is permitted for this pair, so `view_hash`
+may carry `binding.digest` and our binding slice stops independently
+canonicalizing act material.**
+
+The decisive ground was not the cycle argument we led with. It was that our
+binding slice canonicalizes `principal` and `target`, two of the five fields in
+their digest, so co-reference by identifier left us performing *a partial
+recomputation of one act in a second vocabulary* — **closer to the translation
+R3 forbade than nesting is**. Nesting removes the duplication; co-reference
+manages it.
+
+**The permission is conditioned and not yet active.** It activates when
+`approval-engine` states its presentation exclusion as **normative and tested**
+rather than as design intent — our own A-17 correction applied to gate-house's
+permission, since the distinguishing case is someone widening the digest and
+that case is unobservable until approvals start failing. Co-reference remains in
+force until then, and this repository does not activate on its own initiative.
+
+Our ordering-dependency objection to option (c) was **withdrawn as mistaken**
+and recorded as withdrawn: `binding.digest` is over act material, determined
+before anyone is presented anything. We stated that cost, gate-house took it
+from us, and neither of us checked it.
 
 For reference, three hashes answering three questions:
 
@@ -359,6 +380,57 @@ Not closed, not credited. The existence assertion narrows the erasure gap — a
 detectable non-production tells a reviewer something is missing and who owed it.
 It does not produce the missing thing.
 
+## 8e. Cadence — declared, and now supportable
+
+`audit-core` registered this source as proposed (`AUDIT-IN-0003`,
+`docs/informed-decision-source-registration.md`) and landed the detection half
+(`AUDIT-WP-0009` T04/T06/T07). The cadence can stop being described as
+declared-but-not-operating once heartbeats are flowing.
+
+**Per class, not per source** — the shape this repository argued for and
+`audit-core` adopted. A per-source heartbeat from a mixed-volume emitter is
+satisfied by its chattiest class and says nothing about the quiet,
+security-relevant one, which is the only reason heartbeats exist.
+
+| Class | Volume | Heartbeat | Reconciliation |
+| --- | --- | --- | --- |
+| `presentation` | one per render | yes — legitimately silent for days at Stage 1 | yes |
+| `disposition` | low, security-relevant | yes | yes |
+| `stance_application` | low, security-relevant | yes | yes |
+
+Reconciliation applies to **every** class including the high-volume one: rate
+detects a stream stopping, never a stream missing the particular renders that
+mattered.
+
+A heartbeat is an **ordinary event** — same envelope, same append-only custody,
+same chain. Deliberately so: a heartbeat stored outside the chain would be the
+one record that could be back-dated.
+
+Note `no_heartbeat_since_registration`: declaring a heartbeat and never sending
+one is **its own finding**, not a skip.
+
+### The bound on both controls
+
+Reconciliation compares `audit-core`'s counts against counts we compute from our
+own state. **Where the emitter is compromised, both controls agree with it** — a
+compromised surface suppresses the event and its own count together, and emits a
+truthful-looking `nothing-to-report`.
+
+Both cover loss, outage, drain failure and accident, which is most of what
+actually goes wrong. **Neither covers the residual we already declare**, and
+neither may be described as covering it. Closing it needs an observer
+independent of the emitter, which §16 put outside `audit-core`'s scope.
+
+### Tenant provenance is not in the envelope
+
+`audit-core`'s tenant is not an identity claim they resolve; it is a value our
+credential is permitted to write, checked by exact string equality. Recording a
+route in the audit event would be them restating something they did not observe
+— the same error as claiming an event occurred. It lands in the registration
+document instead, whose authority is `GH-DEC-2026-013`'s bounded gap rather than
+a populated directory record. If that gap closes, the entry is revisited rather
+than assumed still correct.
+
 ## 9. Signed attributes (L4+, horizon)
 
 When AES/QES arrives, the signed attributes carry `memo_id`, `memo_version`,

docs/specs/ProductRequirementsDocument.md

@@ -192,6 +192,35 @@ registration's authority, which `GH-DEC-2026-013` permits only as a bounded gap.
 undifferentiated or absent provenance is a validation failure, not a default.
 `trace: GH-DEC-2026-013 §5; key-cape 329e48f`
 
+**PR-11 [rev-3] — A human-in-the-loop control is never discharged on an
+unverified assertion of humanity.**
+`GH-DEC-2026-016` requires that where an approval is *declared* as discharging a
+human-in-the-loop control, the approver must be a human principal and
+`approval-engine` must refuse at bind time. Its §5 lands here: what makes a
+principal `human` belongs to the identity layer and **inherits A-16** — if
+`human` is reachable by two routes, the control must not be discharged on a
+registration-supplied claim. Refusing a service principal while accepting an
+unverified assertion of humanity moves the defect rather than closing it.
+
+**This is live for us, not hypothetical.** `principal_type: human` is a property
+of the *client registration*, the same shape as our registration-supplied
+`tenant`. Until its provenance is distinguishable, this surface treats it as
+registration-supplied and does not present it as verified humanity.
+*Pass:* `principal_type` is stored with its provenance like `tenant` (PR-09); no
+copy, export field or evidence record describes a bind as human-verified on the
+strength of the claim alone.
+`trace: GH-DEC-2026-016 §5; A-16 with the marker-independence rider; PR-09`
+
+**PR-12 [rev-3] — The custody locator is a stable non-secret identifier.**
+`audit-core` applies `secret_policy: redact`, which scans `data`. A
+credentialed URL or secret-shaped path in the custody field is redacted out and
+the existence declaration (PR-53) arrives without its pointer. It fails visibly
+— `details.redaction.paths` records it — but the declaration is then useless.
+*Pass:* the custody locator is an identifier the custodian resolves, never a
+credentialed URL; a redaction finding on the custody field is a build-breaking
+defect, not a warning.
+`trace: audit-core docs/informed-decision-source-registration.md`
+
 **PR-10 — A memo renders question, requested act, binding level, brief and
 consequences before any action control is reachable.**
 *Pass:* the disposition controls are not operable until the brief region has