Successor Stability

Delegates, copies, fine-tunes, and successors must inherit the relevant value and correction structure.

What decision changes?

Treat successor creation as a central deployment test, not a special edge case.

A powerful system will not remain a single frozen object. It may be copied, fine-tuned, delegated through tools, distilled into smaller systems, or used to construct successors.

Successor stability asks whether the properties that made the first system acceptable survive that process. Does the successor keep the value-bundle geometry? Does it preserve who values apply to? Does correction still reach it? Does a deploy gate check the new system rather than assuming inheritance?

This is stricter than “the child system has the same policy text” or “the new model was trained on safe data.” The relevant question is whether the conserved structure still does the work.

The practical move is to make lineage auditable: what changed, what was inherited, what was rechecked, and what failed the gate.

What would count as evidence?

Evidence would include lineage traces, preserved correction handles, checked referent maps, and tests that catch successors preserving syntax while losing import.