Governance Receipt Coverage for Human-AI Decision Systems: Constitutional Signing Authority, Auto-Sign at Emission, and End-to-End Receipt Verification | APR-Lite Phase 14 — Technical Note

This record documents Phase 14 of APR‑Lite, a cryptographic governance layer designed to preserve human decision authority over AI‑influenced outputs in regulated environments. Phase 14 extends the prior cryptographic stack to ensure that designated high‑authority governance activity produces independently verifiable proof artifacts as a normal consequence of operation, without requiring out‑of‑band workflows.

In contrast to earlier phases, which limited signed artifacts to a narrow subset of cross‑boundary interactions, Phase 14 generalizes signing across the broader governance surface. The authority model continues to follow the existing governance constitution: signatures are bound to the entity asserting authority in an act, with role‑appropriate keys used for regulator‑level, tenant‑scoped, and substrate‑level assertions. Cross‑boundary interactions carry sufficient authority context for verifiers to locate relevant verification material without relying on hidden mappings.

To avoid gaps in proof coverage, Phase 14 introduces a fallback behavior in which designated substrate authority keys provide coverage for actors that have not yet been provisioned with their own signing material. Signing is implemented so that proof production is best‑effort and non‑blocking with respect to the underlying governance decisions.

Phase 14 also completes the public proof surface by pairing an integrity‑verification interface with a corresponding mechanism for retrieving proof artifacts by event reference, without requiring direct substrate access. Proof artifacts are self‑contained with respect to integrity verification, and remain anchored into the tamper‑evident history introduced in an earlier phase of APR‑Lite.

This phase achieved full success on its smoke‑test suite for the extended proof pipeline in worker version 8.2.0‑p14.4. A more detailed technical treatment, including formal models and implementation guidance, is available under restricted access to qualified requesters.