Institutional Continuity Infrastructure: A Formal Model from Governing Meaning to Provable Machine Consequence

Agentic systems increasingly cross institutional boundaries by initiating payments, changing records, granting access, deploying code, and producing outputs on which organizations rely. Authorization, policy evaluation, runtime monitoring, provenance, conformance checking, and audit frameworks each address important portions of this problem, but they do not by themselves establish that a machine consequence remains continuously connected to the institutional meaning from which authority is claimed.

This article defines Institutional Continuity Infrastructure (ICI) as a typed nine-node continuity model with eight independently testable joins spanning source, admitted meaning, warranted control, runtime authority, exact action, consequence, independent observation, reconciliation, and examination. It formalizes three non-interchangeable authority planes, a non-compensatory join-status algebra, exact-action binding, independent consequence coverage, and append-only correction. Six propositions are stated with proof sketches. A bounded executable conformance checker exhaustively evaluates all 5,764,801 possible eight-join status vectors and uses mutation discrimination to test implementation conformance to the specified aggregation algebra.

The central result is deliberately bounded: institutional continuity is not established by correctness at any single link. It requires an unbroken, independently examinable witness path across every mandatory join under explicit materiality, currentness, authority, causal, and evidence assumptions.

The public ICI v0.1.0 architecture and conformance release is maintained separately at:
https://github.com/veraxis-protocol/institutional-continuity/releases/tag/ici%2Fv0.1.0