Every query is distilled, evaluated, and attested before it crosses the boundary. Every response is attested before it returns. Nothing moves without a Chronicle record. The audit chain is not a receipt. It is the gate.
Most AI interfaces are direct: human input arrives at a frontier model, a response comes back. No evaluation of what was asked. No governed record of what was returned. No attestation that the boundary crossing was authorized.
In a consumer context, this is acceptable. In a regulated enterprise, a defense contractor, a healthcare system, or any environment where the humans at the top are legally accountable for what the AI did — it is not.
Elenchus is that protocol. Every interaction between a human principal and a governed execution substrate passes through two evaluation gates before reaching any external AI API. Every response passes through an attestation gate before returning to the principal. Every cycle — success or failure — produces an immutable Chandra Chronicle record.
Voice is the reference transport. The protocol is transport-agnostic.
Every Elenchus Unit (EU) — one complete governed interaction cycle — traverses this pipeline in order. No stage may be skipped.
The Elenchus Unit is the atomic primitive of the protocol — one complete governed interaction cycle. An EU opens on principal input and closes when a Chandra CU is written. An EU that does not produce a CU has not closed. There is no other terminal state.
Every EU closure event produces a Chandra Chronicle Unit. The CU carries the EU identifier, pipeline stage-of-failure (if any), model hash reference, session identifier, transport binding, and the hash of the preceding CU in the chain. The Chronicle is the authoritative record of all principal interactions.
A conforming Elenchus implementation must produce a GABA Standard Governed AI Boundary Attestation Report (ABRAR). The ABRAR must reference a Chandra CU as its mandatory attestation anchor. An ABRAR without a CU reference is a document. An ABRAR with a CU reference is an attestation. Elenchus requires attestation.
Elenchus is MIT licensed. The specification is the contribution. Reference implementation is provided by Aegis Genera in Allegro Common Lisp on a Yocto build substrate.
General Reasoning, Inc. maintains the Distilled Model governance criteria, the Elenchus NLQ Evaluation Suite, and the evaluated model registry published at this site. Governance follows the benevolent dictator model — merge authority is not shared. A governed protocol with open merge authority on its evaluation suite is a protocol that can be poisoned through contribution.
NIST standardization of the Distilled Model governance criteria is in progress.