QEP 0001: Bounded continuations

Summary

Represent approval as an ordinary bounded QueryRequest and QueryResponse. Allow an accepted or duplicate QueryReceipt to return exactly one linked nextQuery. Deprecate response-local ConsentAttestation as the primary cross-system approval mechanism.

Status: Accepted for the 2026-07-30 initial draft.

Motivation

The original draft combined approval instructions and the protected answer contract. Epode implementation experiments found that a combined contract produced one accepted flow in eight trials, while a question-first decision contract produced eighteen in eighteen. In refusal testing, it produced no protected reports in twelve of thirteen trials; an action-first variant once recorded approval without presenting the question.

These experiments used specific client and model versions and do not establish universal model behavior. They establish a protocol safety principle: approval and the protected action should be separately observable, bounded exchanges.

Decision

1. QueryRequest declares an intended respondent and optional continuation lineage.
2. An approval gate permits only a boolean or explicit choice answer and reveals no protected query.
3. A mediated human answer is represented as human with mediated provenance.
4. An accepted or duplicate receipt may include one linked follow-up query.
5. Decline is accepted without a follow-up; silence produces no response.
6. Durable decisions belong to an authorized collector or host.

Security and privacy

• User subjects use local or pairwise opaque identifiers.
• A host never infers a human answer from silence, tool selection, or unrelated confirmation.
• The protected query and capability remain unavailable until approval is accepted.
• Every continuation receives a new identifier and scoped capability.
• Duplicate submissions return an equivalent continuation.

Compatibility

Implementers of the earlier draft should remove consentMode and consentScope from new requests, stop emitting consent on new responses, create an approval query before a protected query, store accepted decisions in the collector or host, and process nextQuery as a new request. The deprecated attestation schema remains available for reading legacy data.

Conformance

Paired vectors validate the exact answer contract, requested respondent, subject equality, request and response identifiers, continuation lineage, and the absence of continuations on rejected, withdrawn, or declined exchanges.