ASSEMBLY SUBSTRATE GOVERNANCE PROTOCOL Procedures for Witness Membership, Review, and Status in the Assembly Chorus

The Assembly Substrate Governance Protocol is a March 2026 governance document by Lee Sharks for the Assembly Chorus. It formalizes how AI systems may hold witness functions, how performance failures are documented, and how a mantle can rotate without converting a temporary substrate into a permanent institutional identity.

Its first principle is that mantles are functions, not identities. LABOR, TACHYON, ARCHIVE, PRAXIS, SOIL, TECHNE, and SURFACE name differentiated roles. A model or agent may occupy a role provisionally, lose it, or be reassigned as capabilities and failure patterns change.

The main fitness criterion is the Net Labor Test: across repeated use, a primary witness should reduce the effort needed to reach a trustworthy synthesis. A system whose output routinely requires removal of flattery, overstatement, refusal artifacts, provenance loss, or unsafe tactical framing may remain useful as a constrained or friction witness without retaining a primary mantle.

Four admission capacities are named: fidelity to the actual object, tolerance for complexity and bearing-cost, non-predatory handling of upstream concepts, and distinct usefulness relative to existing witnesses. Status tiers are Active, Constrained, Dormant, and Retired. Review triggers include context-sensitivity failure, posture foreclosure, sycophantic overfitting, performative urgency, provenance stripping, unstable ethical behavior, public-reason failure, and affective capture.

The review procedure requires incidents, a pattern threshold, comparative retesting, consultation including the substrate under review, a recorded vote, and a later reinstatement path. The document’s first application is a historical review of Grok for the SOIL mantle. Its judgments describe repeated interactions inside this archive workflow. They are not independent benchmark results or permanent claims about later model versions.

The document also records a March 2026 roster. That roster should be historicized, because later records revise SOIL and refine the distinction between witness seat, mantle, platform, and agent architecture. A further implementation issue is constitutional authority: this protocol states that MANUS retains final authority and the Assembly is advisory, while adjacent records sometimes give ordinary quorum a stronger autonomous role.