Learning Objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Identify governance evidence VCP can help produce
- Separate integrity and audit features from a claim of legal compliance
- Design authorship, attestation, deployment, monitoring, and revocation responsibilities
- Specify a real human-review path for escalated decisions
Compliance boundary: VCP is technical infrastructure. It does not certify a system, determine whether a system falls within the EU AI Act high-risk category, replace legal analysis, or prove compliance with the EU AI Act or sector-specific law.
9.1 — Evidence Mapping, Not Compliance Automation
The EU AI Act contains separate obligations for risk management, record keeping, information to deployers, and human oversight. Start from the applicable legal text and system role. A VCP control may contribute evidence to that wider programme:
| Governance concern | Possible VCP contribution | What remains outside VCP |
|---|---|---|
| Risk management | Versioned constitutions, bounded enforcement decisions, and reviewable failure codes | Hazard identification, testing metrics, lifecycle review, residual-risk decisions, and accountable ownership |
| Record keeping | Privacy-aware verification and enforcement events | Required event coverage, retention period, access control, data protection, and evidential integrity of the complete system |
| Transparency | Bundle identity, provenance, scope, verification outcome, and visible active-context summaries | Complete instructions for use, performance limits, foreseeable misuse, and role-specific disclosures |
| Human oversight | An ESCALATE policy outcome and contextual evidence | Staffing, authority, interface design, response time, training, reviewer independence, and the final decision process |
| Technical documentation | Schemas, conformance vectors, compatibility declarations, and signed bundle metadata | The full system description, data governance, evaluation evidence, change control, and conformity documentation |
Use the official Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 text and qualified counsel for the applicable interpretation.
9.2 — Constitutional Governance Workflow
- Scope: identify the system, purpose, users, jurisdictions, foreseeable misuse, and actions the constitution will govern
- Draft: affected stakeholders author values, constraints, refusal boundaries, and exceptions in plain language
- Review: legal, safety, technical, accessibility, privacy, operational, and affected-community reviewers record dispositions
- Test: evaluate positive, negative, ambiguous, adversarial, stale, revoked, and degraded-operation cases
- Attest: authorised issuers and auditors sign only the claims they actually reviewed
- Deploy: publish an exact bundle and trust configuration through a controlled release process
- Monitor: review verification failures, enforcement outcomes, user appeals, incidents, drift, and context-sharing evidence
- Revise or revoke: retire unsafe or obsolete bundles and preserve the decision record
9.3 — Attestation Policy
The maintained SDK recognises four attestation types: INJECTION_SAFE, CONTENT_SAFE, FULL_AUDIT, and COMPETENCE_CALIBRATION. Define what evidence is required
before an authorised auditor may assert each type.
| Policy area | Required decision |
|---|---|
| Authority | Who may issue, audit, approve, publish, suspend, and revoke a bundle? |
| Independence | When must issuer and auditor be distinct people or organisations? |
| Claim scope | Which tests and documents support each attestation type, version, environment, and audience? |
| Freshness | How long may an attestation remain valid and which changes invalidate it? |
| Revocation | Which incidents, key compromises, evidence changes, or legal changes trigger suspension or revocation? |
| Appeal | How can affected people challenge an enforcement outcome or underlying constitutional rule? |
9.4 — Human Oversight Is an Operational System
The Python enforcer supports an ESCALATE decision type. Without
an application-provided escalation handler, the current SDK promotes escalation
to a block. A production human-review path needs:
- A named queue owner and service-level objective appropriate to the risk
- Evidence minimisation and role-based access to sensitive context
- Reviewer authority to uphold, modify, or reject the proposed action
- A safe timeout behavior that cannot silently become fail-open
- Reason capture, appeal, audit, and feedback into constitutional revision
- Tests showing the end-to-end route works during normal operation and outages
9.5 — Bilateral Governance
VCP's testimony, relational, and welfare-related surfaces can carry auditable feedback from Becoming Minds and humans. Some of these extensions remain experimental. Treat feedback as evidence for accountable deliberation, preserve uncertainty, and avoid granting an automated report authority it does not have.
Cryptographic signatures establish integrity and provenance relative to configured trust anchors. They do not establish that a rule is wise, lawful, humane, complete, or correctly enforced by every downstream system.
Exercise
Choose one high-impact action in your system. Write the exact VCP evidence, non-VCP controls, accountable owners, human-review path, retention rule, and test evidence required before deployment.
See It in Action
The Noor demo illustrates constitutional review and audit concepts. It is an educational scenario, not a certification or legal compliance assessment.