Intervention-Disclosure Visibility and Time-Bounded Selective Nondisclosure in Hierarchical Agent Systems
Abstract
Within Soft and Hard De-Attraction (SHDA), this paper treats intervention disclosure in persistent-state artificial agents as an observer-field-channel-time contract. It separates assignment, valid delivery, existence awareness and field knowledge, records missing measurement as UNKNOWN, and distinguishes disclosure-policy from awareness-mediated effects, whose natural forms need further identifying assumptions. By Proposition W1, field knowledge is monotone under joins of views and retained histories but cannot be certified view by view. Building on the elementary direction of Blackwell's comparison of experiments, Proposition W2 bounds an evaluator's one-shot benefit from withholding by departures from common loss, optimal response, free imitation, an exogenous environment and garbling on the complete evidence, each to be estimated or bounded. Under Proposition W3, a linearizable family ledger bounds authorized, not actual, nondisclosure duration and renewals by the admitting constraints' caps across splits, merges and reclassifications. The paper specifies witness-bound nondisclosure authorization with stable semantic families and persistent obligations, release checks against combined histories, and unexecuted efficacy protocols. Finite-state checks of frozen ledger rules instantiate family accounting and obligation persistence under revision, split/merge and partial or uncertain effect outcomes; without exposure or knowledge state, they retain overcommitted and overdue histories but prove neither timely fulfillment nor usefulness. The contribution is a typed governance interface over established information, missing-data, estimand, auditing and logging results, not a universally optimal disclosure mode, deployed-system safety or permission to conceal interventions from or on humans. Note on Version 2.0. This version replaces Version 1.0 (September 2026; about 9,100 words) and is a substantial revision (about 23,500 words). It adds Propositions W1 to W3 (field knowledge under joins of views, a bound on the one-shot benefit of withholding, and family-ledger caps on authorized nondisclosure), witness-bound nondisclosure authorization, release checks against combined histories and finite-state checks of frozen ledger rules. Files: the manuscript as PDF and a supplement archive (17 files) with the exact mathematical and finite governance checks, the family re-enumeration cited in the paper and the protocol witnesses; the full shared validation reports are in the supplement of the flagship record. The Version 1.0 file remains available in the previous version of this record. Publication role. Companion B develops the disclosure and obligation branch of the Integrated Framework series on contract-preserving lower-to-upper recalibration (SHDA). The flagship and its Technical Supplement are archived separately, as are Companion A on residual genesis and dynamic feedback route attribution, Companion C on family-scoped capability control, typed lineage and atomic re-entry, and the technical working paper SHDA Algorithms for Scoped Evidence Reuse and Recalibration. The formal scope is artificial agent systems; the selection rules do not apply to undisclosed interventions on humans, which require separate consent, rights, and legal and ethical review. No deployment result is reported. AI use disclosure. Generative AI (GPT-6.0, OpenAI; Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic) was used substantively in preparing this work, including source comparison, drafting and editing, and, where applicable, mathematical and counterexample checks and the writing and running of supplementary code. The research questions, framework and final claims were directed and reviewed by the author, who takes full responsibility for the content, including the accuracy of all references and reported numbers. Repository metadata were prepared with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).
