Trust
What registration does not mean.
Registration records provenance. It does not establish that a skill set is safe, accurate or fit for any particular purpose.
This page says what the register does not establish, what its words mean and which three words are not states on it, who keeps custody of the material, and how a record is kept. Every section below is either a refusal or a mechanism. There is no ladder of approval on this register, nothing here assesses a person, and no control is named on this page that does not exist.
The register records provenance. It establishes nothing else.
Registration records provenance. It does not establish that a skill set is safe, accurate or fit for any particular purpose.
This register records what was asserted, who asserted it, on what date, and what evidence was produced with it. It records that it has not tested the assertion. It does not decide who owns anything.
Those two sentences are the whole of what an entry claims. What follows takes the five things a reader is most likely to read into a registration, one at a time, and says what the register actually does instead.
The refusals, one at a time
Not ownership.
An entry records an assertion of rights and the evidence filed with it. It does not settle title. A question between an employer and a person, or between a contractor and a customer, is decided where such questions are decided, and this register's record is evidence in it and nothing more. Where a rights question is open, the rights intake says so before a number issues, and its four outcomes — clear, requires a release, private only, cannot register — are on Rights.
Not safety.
A licence permits a use; it never requires one. The machine's own safety logic refuses whenever it refuses. The answer this register gives before a use is about coverage — whether the licence covers this number and this edition — and it is never a release, a pass or a step in a safety case. Rights policy never asserts safety, and a machine that refuses a job refuses it on its own logic, whatever the licence says. What the register answers, and what it never answers, is set out on the Registry.
Not accuracy, and not fitness for a job.
The intake tests rights, not quality. Nothing in it asks whether a way of working is the best one, and nothing on a Card scores it. A Card says what an entry covers and what it refuses — the machine families, the environment, the operating modes, the stated assumptions and the known exclusions — so that a reader can decide whether it fits the work in front of them. Where a machine's behaviour is tested, it is tested against an Evaluation set, and the machine is tested, never the person. The result goes to the licensee about the machine, and never onto a public page.
Not that no other copy exists.
A check shows that this number, this edition and this seal are the ones the register issued, and that the copy checked is untouched. It does not establish ownership, and it does not establish that no copy exists anywhere else. A register can say what it issued and that a copy in somebody's hand matches it. It cannot see the world outside its own record, and this one does not pretend to. Verify sets out the four answers a check gives.
Not that a model has forgotten anyone.
When a Source ends a learning or derivative licence, the rule is a dated one: material used to build a model comes out at the model's next revision, and that date is stated to the person before they sign. And with it, always: The register never claims a model has forgotten anyone. A right to end something can be honoured in a database, a retrieval index or anything else separately addressable; in a large model built the ordinary way it cannot be honoured in a way a second party can check, and saying so is the honest position. Both rules, kind by kind, are on Protect.
One more refusal runs under all five, and it is the one this register would not trade for anything: a record is never supplied to assess the person, to an insurer or to anyone else. Nothing kept here ranks, grades or scores anybody, and no entry is ever read as a report on how somebody is doing.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, the list above is what stops a number from becoming a verdict on them. For an OEM's procurement officer, it is the honest boundary of what a registration can be relied on for, which is worth more in a purchase than a badge would be. For counsel, it is the register's own statement of the limits of its record, made on the record rather than in a disclaimer at the foot of a page.
A legend of words, and not a ladder.
The register keeps two axes and never merges them: the lifecycle of a number, which is licensee-side, and the rights state, which runs recorded → declared → documented. One is the working state of a number as the parties to it see it. The other is what the register holds about the rights asserted in it. Reading either as a rung on the other is the mistake this page exists to prevent.
The one public status word on this register is Specified.
Why one word is a ruling rather than an omission. A second published word would have to mean something the register has tested, and the register tests rights, not skill. One word says what is true of every entry — that it is written down and numbered — without implying a rank, a grade or a stage of approval that nobody here is in a position to award. The words below are the rest of the register's vocabulary, and they are a glossary, not a scale.
The one public status word
- Specified Written down and numbered.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| specified | Written down and numbered. |
| in evaluation | The intake is running. |
| issued | The intake is complete and the number has issued. |
| suspended | No new licence while a matter is open. |
| withdrawn | The Source has ended it, on the rule for that licence kind. |
| retired | Superseded or closed; the number stays reserved forever. |
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| recorded | The assertion is on file. |
| declared | The assertion is made by a named party who is answerable for it. |
| documented | Evidence is filed with it. |
The rights state ends at documented. Where an outside assertion has been checked against an independent source, the register writes that it was checked independently and against what — and that is a note on the evidence, not a fourth rung and not a finding about the person who made the assertion.
The intake's four outcomes
- clear
- requires a release
- private only
- cannot register
A dispute has words of its own — challenge, freeze, review, resolution, appeal, supersession, and the assertion that what an entry covers is common knowledge — and how each is written against a number is on the Registry. So is the third list of words, the three ways an entry is carried: published, restricted and closed. These say where an entry is carried, not what a skill set is worth.
Verified, validated and cleared are not states on this register. A check is something that is done to a seal, not a rank a skill set holds; and a finding about somebody else's title is not one this register has the facts to make. The first two would say the register had tested a thing it does not test. The third would say it had settled a question it does not settle. Naming them here, rather than leaving them out, is the half of the legend that does the work: a reader looking for the rung that is missing should find a sentence saying why there is none.
The legend is a glossary of the register's words. It is not a ladder a skill set climbs. No word above is a level, a tier or a grade; none of them is coloured to read as progress; and none of them carries a count beside it.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, none of these words is a mark out of ten, and the plain version of that is on Not a score. For an OEM's procurement officer, the lifecycle is the one that matters in a purchase, and it is licensee-side because it is the parties' business and not the public's. For counsel, the two axes are kept apart so that a rights position and an operational state can never be confused for one another in evidence.
The material can stay where it is.
Registering a skill set does not require giving up custody of the material it was made from.
What custody is. Custody is the question of who holds the readable material — the recorded sessions, the retained paper, the files a practice works from. Registration puts an address, a rights record and a licence on what was made of that material. It does not ask for the material itself, and the local copy is the default rather than an upgrade somebody pays for.
Why it works this way here. A register of what a person or a practice knows cannot demand the material as the price of an address; if it did, the people with the most to protect would be the ones who could never register. The house that collects a practice works on the customer's own machine for exactly that reason, and its own line is what makes this sentence true rather than aspirational: a customer's own records never feed a reference unless they choose to contribute them. Strategic Agent sets that out.
What the record holds instead. The entry records that the material exists, who it came from, where it is held, what was made of it, and what may be done with that under which licence. A check reads the seal on the edition, never the material behind it. Where a Source is a company, the Card carries it coded and the register holds the code map — the name is withheld, not absent, and no claim is made anywhere that a record has been cleared of its identifiers.
What is refused, and what is open. Custody is not something this register promises to secure; it is something the holder keeps because nothing in registration takes it. Escrow — lodging a copy with a third party against a failure — is a different question, and it is an open one: what it would ask a holder to give up, and on what terms, is in front of counsel, and Enterprise states the trade rather than promising the arrangement.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, it means handing over a way of working is not handing over the tapes. For an OEM's procurement officer, it means a supplier can register what it licenses without exporting its own files. For counsel, custody is the line between what the register asserts about a thing and what it holds of that thing, and the two are kept separate on purpose.
Sealed, appended, and never rewritten.
What is kept. Every number carries an append-only event history: created to retired, every line written at the time it happened, every line sealed in a chain whose day's head is anchored. An edition is sealed when it is frozen, and a check is recomputed from the sealed Card every time it is asked — nothing is stored as a verdict, so there is no stored answer to go stale or to be edited. Its seal can be checked at tacittessera.com/verify.
What is never done to it. A line is never rewritten. A correction is an administrative edit recorded as its own event, so the earlier line and the correction both stand and a reader can see which is which. Nothing contested is deleted: a challenge is recorded and left there while it runs. A superseded entry stays readable, and a retired number stays reserved forever rather than being handed to something else.
Why it is described this way and no other. This page names a mechanism and does not name a control that does not exist. There is no list of attestations here, no audit ladder and no badge. What is built is the shape above: sealed records, an anchored history, a local copy by default, and a check anybody can run against a number without asking permission first.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, it means the day they end something is written down at the time and stays written down. For an OEM's procurement officer, it means the record a licence is written against can be read back at a date, and an edition can be pinned. For counsel, append-only with an anchored head and corrections as their own events is what separates a record that can be relied on from one that can be tidied afterwards.