Failures are loud.
Drift is quiet.
System behavior, memory, policy, and authority tend to silently diverge over time. Drift Guard exists to hear the quiet before it becomes a failure.
Drift Guard continuously detects and halts divergence between authorized intent and actual AI behavior over time.
What is Drift Guard?
Drift Guard is the continuous integrity layer of the Cosmocrat operating system. While the Gate System authorizes individual actions at a point in time, Drift Guard ensures that system behavior does not diverge from what was authorized, proved, or intended as the system evolves.
Drift emerges across time and state transitions — not within a single execution.
It spans five critical domains: behavior, memory, policy, authority, and structure. Unlike monitoring tools that look for crashes, Drift Guard detects divergence from authorized behavior even when the system appears to be functioning normally.
When divergence is detected, it enforces corrective action by default. This generates Decision Exhaust to document the event and informs the Runtime Governance kernel to tighten future enforcement.
Are we still doing what we proved we were doing?
Monitoring asks: "Is something wrong?" — Drift Guard asks: "Is this still authorized?"
A Distributed Enforcement Mesh
Drift Guard is not a single service. It is embedded into the core runtime to enforce integrity across behavioral, policy, and structural domains simultaneously.
The Five Domains of Drift
Drift is not just "hallucination." It is structural decay across five specific vectors.
Behavioral Drift
Vibe shifts & variance
Policy Drift
Silent rule changes
Context Drift
Memory pollution
Authority Drift
Implicit permission creep
Structural Drift
Broken audit trails
Behavioral Drift
Same inputs, different actions.
Policy Drift
Rules changed without promotion.
Structural Drift
Chronicle events missing.
Authority Drift
Action taken with implicit permission.
Context Drift
Wrong memory influenced decision.
Preventing Vibe Shifts and Silent Rule Changes
Two distinct mechanisms for two distinct types of drift.
Behavioral Drift
Problem: Model behaves differently under load.
Mechanism: AIMD Controllers.
Policy Drift
Problem: Rules change without oversight.
Mechanism: Receipt Binding & Policy Hash.
No Grandfathered Permissions
Problem: A permission granted yesterday may not be valid today if risk thresholds change.
Drift Guard re-evaluates Gate conditions at runtime. If "Risk < Threshold" is false today, the gate shuts. The system does not respect historical precedent, only current policy.
Lane Pollution Detectors
Core Concept: Did memory from outside the allowed Lane influence this decision?
Standard RAG dumps context into a blender. Cosmocrat treats memory as a governed resource with "Lane" boundaries. The Side-Brain acts as a governed memory interface—non-admissible memory is invisible to the model.
- Context never bleeds across lanes.
- Explicit permission required for memory cross-over.
Active Response: The Fail-Closed Doctrine
Drift is treated as a governance event, not an ops anomaly. The system does not "fix it live."
Degrade to SHADOW
Observe-only mode. The action is executed in a sandbox, outputs are discarded, drift is logged.
Quarantine Lane
Prevent contamination. The Lane is locked; no new memory can be written, no external tools called.
Halt & Require G4
Human re-authorization required. The system stops and demands explicit authority to proceed.
Compliance is Evidence, Not Narrative
Trust is the product. Receipts are the proof. Drift Guard provides the artifacts that prove control was maintained.