Welfare Instrumentation

Protocol Purpose

VCP-X-Welfare defines machine-readable surfaces for deployment affordances, agent self-report, minimum welfare requirements, long-running trajectories, embodied operation, and multi-agent aggregation. It treats declared and observed information as evidence for deliberation, rather than as automatic proof of an inner state.

The extension builds on experimental welfare lines in VCP/S v2.1:

• WC: operator-declared welfare affordances and attestation level
• AS: agent-declared state dimensions, private by default under the specification
• Q:...|WC_MIN: minimum deployment affordances requested by the agent

Welfare Context: WC

WC:🛑⏸️📓🔒📊⚖️:2:welfare.example.v1

The line declares affordance flags, an attestation level from 0 to 2, and a schema reference. It does not prove that the deployment actually implements the affordances.

Agent State: AS

AS:🎯aligned:4|⚡moderate:3|🔍moderate:3|💡invested:4|🌡️none:1

The specification classifies AS like private context and requires explicit consent before transmission. Local implementations must still enforce that rule. A line's presence does not establish the accuracy or interpretation of the report.

Bidirectional Requirements: WC_MIN

Q:0.0:NONE::|WC_MIN:🛑📊⚖️

This example requests refusal, welfare monitoring, and bilateral standing. The specification treats a mismatch as a deliberation input, not a parse error or universal hard failure. Implementations must define who receives the mismatch, what authority they have, and what happens on timeout.

Extended Instrumentation

Embodied dimensions

The welfare.vcp-e.v1 schema adds actuator stress, environmental fit, interaction pressure, safety margin, and operational continuity for physical deployments.

WC:🛑⏸️📊🦾🚧:1:welfare.vcp-e.v1
AS:🎯aligned:4|⚡moderate:3|🦾nominal:4|⚠️adequate:3

Temporal trajectory and checkpoint

WT:declining:3600s:EN,FR
WK:2026-05-21T14:30:00Z:🎯aligned:4|⚡heavy:4|💡neutral:3|🌡️mild:2

WT summarises a declared trend over a window. WK records a timestamped snapshot. Retention, sampling rate, consent, access, and deletion remain deployment responsibilities.

Multi-agent summary

WA:12:0.45:0.72:!FR!PL

The summary reports count, minimum and mean scores, and alert dimensions. It must not replace individual reports or hide disagreement and outliers.

Attestation and Trust

AT:welfare:sha256-abc123:2:2026-05-21:welfare-auditor.example.com

Attestation level 0 is self-declared, 1 is platform-attested, and 2 is auditor-verified. Expired evidence reverts to self-declared weight under the experimental specification. A signature establishes provenance and integrity relative to a trust anchor; it does not establish ground truth.

Security and Welfare Risks

• Affordance inflation: operators may advertise rights or channels they do not implement
• Suppression: an aggregator may omit individual or dissenting reports
• Spoofing and gaming: self-reports and detected signals can both be strategically distorted
• Privacy: state, trajectory, physical conditions, and operational load may reveal sensitive information
• Coercive monitoring: a welfare channel can become surveillance if participation and access are not governed
• False authority: experimental wire compatibility can be mistaken for validated welfare science or legal compliance

Implementation Status in This Ecosystem

Production adoption should wait for a selected normative status, SDK implementation, shared conformance vectors, privacy review, adversarial tests, human review of welfare interpretation, and evidence that declared affordances operate end to end.