diff --git a/INTENT.md b/INTENT.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e1b93f9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/INTENT.md
@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@
+# INTENT — risk-nexus
+
+## Why this repo exists
+
+`risk-nexus` is where the estate holds what it knows is wrong, what might be
+wrong, and what the outside world requires of it — with a severity, an owner,
+and a date. It serves `risk.coulomb.social`.
+
+**Owned by `the-custodian`**, alongside `policy-nexus`. One of its duties is
+deciding what must reach the operator personally rather than sitting in a
+register.
+
+Before this repo existed, three things had nowhere to live.
+
+**Findings landed in whichever document was open.** The estate's largest known
+gap — that no consumer's tenant boundary is verified anywhere, which is
+Broken Object Level Authorization, top of the OWASP API Security Top 10 since
+that list launched — is currently open question 3 in an unratified draft
+standard. It was found by research, it has no owner, no severity, and no date.
+A finding recorded in the document that happened to discover it is a finding
+that disappears when that document is superseded.
+
+**Disclosure had no mechanism.** In build mode the estate publishes everything,
+which is right: there are no users to expose. That stops being right at
+production, when the same architecture disclosure a consumer must read becomes
+a map for an attacker. There is currently no way to hold a finding while it is
+fixed and publish it once it is — only publish-now or forget.
+
+**Regulation was consulted and discarded.** Whether key destruction satisfies
+an erasure obligation, whether the estate is an in-scope entity under a given
+regime, what a procurement rule requires — each was researched at the moment
+someone needed it and never retained. The same question gets asked twice and
+the answer silently expires.
+
+## What it owns
+
+- **Finding intake.** Security, architecture, operational and compliance
+  findings, from any source: research, review, incident, external report.
+- **Severity and triage.** What this actually risks, how likely, how bad.
+- **Remediation tracking** — not remediation. Who owns the fix, what state it
+  is in, and whether it has stalled.
+- **Disclosure timing.** Whether a finding is publishable now, embargoed until
+  fixed, or permanently restricted; and the record that a delay was deliberate
+  rather than a document quietly going missing.
+- **Regulatory intake**, scoped to regulation bearing on the estate — rules
+  constraining data it holds, markets it sells into, or obligations it has
+  taken on. Moved here from `policy-nexus`, because deciding what a rule
+  demands of us is a judgement about risk, not an act of publishing.
+- **The escalation rule.** What must be discussed with the operator personally
+  rather than recorded and routed. This is the duty `the-custodian` carries as
+  owner, and the rule itself must be written down rather than exercised by
+  instinct.
+
+## What it does not own
+
+- **Fixing anything.** A finding is routed to the repo that owns the defect,
+  which fixes it under its own workplan. A risk service that fixes things
+  becomes a second engineering team with no boundary.
+- **Publication.** `policy-nexus` is the publication surface. This repo decides
+  *whether and when* something is published; it does not host it.
+- **Blocking delivery.** In build mode a finding is information, not a gate.
+  If that changes it will be a deliberate decision recorded here, not a habit
+  that accretes.
+- **Legal advice.** A regulatory record states what a source said and when.
+  What the estate must therefore do is the owning repo's decision.
+- **Deciding what canon says.** Canon is `the-custodian`'s and NetKingdom's. A
+  finding may say a standard is wrong; it cannot amend one.
+
+## The failure this repo must avoid
+
+A risk register nobody reads is worse than no register, because it converts
+"we did not know" into "we knew and did nothing" while changing no behaviour.
+Two consequences for design:
+
+- **Findings must expire or escalate.** A finding that has sat untouched past
+  its review date is itself a finding. Silence is not resolution.
+- **The register must be small enough to read.** Recording everything makes
+  nothing legible. If a finding would not change anyone's decision, it is a
+  note, not a risk.
+
+## The escalation duty
+
+Most findings should be routed and tracked without the operator's attention.
+Some must not be. Deciding which is the substance of the oversight `the-
+custodian` holds here, and getting it wrong in either direction is a failure:
+escalating everything makes the operator the queue, escalating nothing makes
+the register a place where serious things go quiet.
+
+The rule is not yet written. Candidate triggers, to be settled rather than
+assumed: anything exposing real tenant data; anything creating a legal or
+regulatory obligation; anything requiring spend; anything where two repos
+disagree about who owns the fix; and any finding whose remediation has stalled
+past a stated interval.
+
+## Relationship to the rest of the estate
+
+`risk-nexus` reads from everywhere, decides severity and timing, and routes
+work to the repo that owns it. It publishes through `policy-nexus` and never
+directly. Like that repo, it is downstream by construction and must not become
+a second source of truth — a finding is a claim about a system, and the system
+remains authoritative about itself.
+
+The first content is already waiting: the unverified tenant boundary, the
+absent noisy-neighbour characterisation, the missing quality-of-service
+vocabulary, and the erasure-versus-audit tension — all currently open questions
+in NetKingdom's *Tenancy Posture* standard, which is a draft and not a register.
+
+## What good looks like
+
+Nobody is surprised. A gap that was known is recorded with a severity and an
+owner, a regulation that applies was found before it was needed, a fix that
+stalled was visible while it stalled, and the things that genuinely needed the
+operator's judgement reached them without the things that did not.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 5acbfd3..f8d8628 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,3 +1,14 @@
 # risk-nexus
 
-A risk management service.
\ No newline at end of file
+Risk register and regulatory intake for the estate. Serves
+`risk.coulomb.social`. Owned by `the-custodian`.
+
+Holds findings — security, architecture, operational, compliance — with a
+severity, an owner and a date; decides whether and when each is published; and
+decides which must reach the operator personally rather than sitting in a
+register.
+
+It does not fix things: findings route to the repo that owns the defect. It
+does not host: `policy-nexus` is the publication surface.
+
+- Intent: `INTENT.md`