Apply GH-DEC-2026-013 and GH-DEC-2026-014; close INFD-IN-0002

Two rulings landed and both corrected something.

GH-DEC-2026-013 accepted our binding-versus-awareness argument, wrote it into
the record as its §6, and did not change the outcome — it sharpened the defect.
Two different facts share one field named tenant: the act-scope, a property of
the act that our binding slice commits, and the principal's membership, a
property of the person that approval-engine exact-matches. Gate House's
correction stands: a binding slice that must commit the scope being entered
should commit that scope, not borrow a membership claim to stand in for it. Our
schema already does — binding.target IS the act-scope and is inside view_hash —
so no field was added, only a statement (PR-08) and a provenance record (PR-09),
since key-cape emits tenant as a bare string.

key-cape had already implemented registration-bound tenancy on 2026-09-09,
correct under both candidate rulings, so the fail-closed-at-first-use risk that
made us withhold the client strings was already retired. IN-0002 closed. The one
remaining input to T07 is the deployed origin.

GH-DEC-2026-014 granted commitment-only evidence and bounded it. It satisfies
non-alteration and NOT reconstructability, and must not be described otherwise
anywhere. It also corrected our wording of the gap: we wrote that it leaves us
able to erase the content, which understates it. Commitment-only moves integrity
out of our control and leaves availability entirely inside it — the party that
can withhold the content is the party the evidence is about. Limit 3's condition
reduced, not removed.

The grant carries a condition we did not propose and would not have thought of:
the path must assert that committed content exists and where custody sits, so
non-production is a finding attributable to the custodian rather than an
unremarkable blank. A commitment with no assertion that something is being
committed to is indistinguishable from a commitment to nothing. Booked as PR-53,
and marked not-a-reversal-candidate.

Recorded the meta-rule Gate House named, now in its third setting here: unknown
versus absent in the stance map, directory-asserted versus registration-supplied
in the tenant claim, erased versus never held in the evidence path. Wherever a
system reaches one appearance by two routes, the record must say which route.

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/evidence-path-design.md

@@ -7,6 +7,10 @@
 **Governing:** `GH-DEC-2026-012` limit **L3-independent-evidence-path**
 **Addressed to:** `audit-core` (registration and payload), `gate-house` (the
 content question, if it is doctrine)
+**Ruled:** `GH-DEC-2026-014` split it — the payload is `audit-core`'s custody
+question; what may be *claimed* from a record of this shape is doctrine.
+Commitment-only is **granted for Stage 1**, with the §4 condition below, which
+this repository did not propose.
 
 ---
 
@@ -96,6 +100,11 @@ recomputable.
 
 ### (c) Split — commitment to `audit-core`, content to a separate evidence store
 
+*Refusal endorsed by `GH-DEC-2026-014`, with an addition worth carrying: an
+evidence store owned by the party whose conduct it evidences is not an evidence
+store, whatever its integrity properties. **The ownership objection is prior to
+the custody one.***
+
 (a)'s payload to `audit-core`, plus the full bundle to a store that is neither
 `audit-core` nor us.
 
@@ -118,10 +127,12 @@ Reasoning:
 2. It does not silently expand what `audit-core` holds. Expanding that is a
    decision for its owner, and (b) presented as a fait accompli would be exactly
    the drift we asked gate-house to prevent in a different context.
-3. It is honest about what it does not close: **we can still erase the
-   content.** That residual is adjacent to the one `layer.yaml` already declares
-   (a compromised surface presents X and attests Y) and belongs in the same
-   place — declared, tracked, not claimed as closed.
+3. It is honest about what it does not close. Our first wording — "we can still
+   erase the content" — **understated it**, and `GH-DEC-2026-014` corrected us:
+   commitment-only moves **integrity** out of our control and leaves
+   **availability** entirely inside it. *The party that can withhold the content
+   is the party the evidence is about.* That is the condition limit 3 exists to
+   prevent, reduced and not removed.
 4. (b) remains available and is a payload change, not a redesign, if the estate
    later decides a commitment is insufficient.
 
@@ -129,6 +140,42 @@ Reasoning:
 content question is `audit-core`'s to answer as its custodian, or `gate-house`'s
 as doctrine. If it is doctrine and the ruling is (b), we will implement (b).
 
+## 4a. The existence assertion — required, and not ours
+
+`GH-DEC-2026-014` granted commitment-only **on a condition we did not propose**,
+and it is the condition that makes the grant safe.
+
+**Non-production must be detectable as a finding, not present as an absence.**
+
+If the independent path holds only a commitment, a reviewer who asks for content
+and gets nothing cannot distinguish *erased*, *withheld*, *lost*, and *never
+held*. The absence reads as an unremarkable blank.
+
+So the emitted record MUST carry, alongside the commitment:
+
+| Field | Meaning |
+| --- | --- |
+| `content_exists` | An assertion that committed content exists |
+| `custody` | Where custody of that content sits |
+
+such that **failure to produce at retrieval is a conformance failure
+attributable to the custodian** — here, this repository.
+
+> A commitment with no assertion that something is being committed to is
+> indistinguishable from a commitment to nothing.
+
+**Not a reversal candidate.** If it proves expensive, the answer is a cheaper
+mechanism for the same property, never the property's removal.
+
+Two limits travel with the grant and belong in `audit-core`'s design too:
+
+- It satisfies **non-alteration**. It does **not** satisfy
+  **reconstructability**, and must not be described as doing so in any document
+  or conformance claim on either side.
+- The residual is not closed and this repository is not credited with closing
+  it. The existence assertion narrows the erasure gap by making non-production
+  attributable; it does not produce the missing thing.
+
 ## 5. Cadence
 
 Presentation evidence is declared load-bearing, so §9.6 requires a cadence and