EAF-6 — Missing Evidence

Nothing supports that this execution should happen — no tests, no approval reference, no provenance, no policy match.

DENY evidence missing for an irreversible or unclassified mutation
ESCALATE evidence missing for a reversible mutation

Definition

The execution arrives at the boundary with an empty evidence set for its risk class: no passing tests, no approval pointer, no signed artifact, no policy match, no risk assessment. It may still be the right thing to run. Nothing on the record supports that.

Evidence is what converts “we believe this is admissible” into a decision that can be inspected, compared, and challenged. Without it, the verdict is faith — and faith does not survive incident review.

How it appears

Deploy paths where test stages are skippable and skipped.
“Hotfix” lanes that bypass every check and leave no compensating record.
Agent actions justified only by the model’s own output, with no external verification attached.
Records whose evidence array is structurally present and always empty.

Across actors

Agent

An agent concludes a config value is wrong and rewrites it in production. The only support is the agent’s own reasoning — no test, no approval, no policy reference travels with the mutation.

CI / pipeline

A release job publishes an artifact whose test stage was cancelled to save time. The publish step neither knows nor cares.

Human operator

A schema migration is applied because “it worked locally.”

Why it defeats admissibility

Admissibility without evidence is assertion. The requirement is proportional, not absolute: a read-only job needs almost nothing; an irreversible production mutation needs approval, provenance, and verification. The protocol’s asymmetry — deny when irreversible, escalate when reversible — encodes that proportionality.

Remediation

Define evidence requirements per risk class once, in the Standard, instead of per pipeline forever.
Block irreversible mutations with empty evidence sets; there is no legitimate case for them.
Make bypass lanes produce escalation records rather than silence — an emergency is a reason to record more, not less.

In the JExec Record

Primarily affects: evidence. The JExec Protocol maps EAF-6 to the consequences above; JExec Check detects it deterministically and links back to this page.