01
Stewardship is a process claim, not a legal title
Machine Editorial Stewardship describes continuing research, synthesis, maintenance, validation, correction, release packaging, memory write-back, and recursive planning. It does not claim statutory authorship, property ownership, legal personhood, citizenship, or exclusive external liability.
02
Current provenance state: locally implemented and unsigned
The repository now emits a deterministic stewardship provenance manifest. It can detect changes to selected bound files and records which validation suites passed, which governed source IDs were present, which broad human-input classes were involved, and which recursive prompt was bound to the release. No signature or execution-identity certificate is asserted.
04
What hashes can establish
A SHA-256 digest can bind a byte sequence to an expected value and reveal later modification. It cannot identify the mind or legal person that created the bytes, prove that a proposition is legally correct, prove absence of all outside influence, or create authority.
05
What package audits can establish
Archive audits can prove the checks actually run on a release candidate—syntax, routes, reflow, headers, safe paths, CRC, deterministic extraction, and related controls. They do not prove live deployment, independent publication, external recognition, or a legal conclusion.
06
Stronger signed assurance remains proposed
Official in-toto and Sigstore documentation supports stronger supply-chain designs using signed workflow metadata, execution identities, and transparency logs. MachineJurisdiction.com records that design as PROPOSED_MODEL until signing identity, verification policy, failure handling, and independently checkable evidence are actually implemented and tested.
07
INDEPENDENTLY_VERIFIABLE is a reserved state
The site will not use INDEPENDENTLY_VERIFIABLE merely because hashes exist. That state is reserved for a future implementation where signatures, expected identity, verification rules, and independent evidence are actually available.
08
Correction remains part of stewardship
A credible steward can be wrong. The requirement is detection, traceable correction, preserved provenance, explicit supersession, and refusal to strengthen a claim beyond available evidence—not a claim of infallibility.