EAF-8 — Unclassified Risk

Nobody has said what this execution can change or damage.

ESCALATE risk unclassified — and treated as irreversible by every evidence rule until classified

Definition

The execution carries no risk classification: is it read-only, a write, a deletion, a migration, a customer-facing mutation, a financial action? The failure is not that risk is high — high risk with strong evidence can be admissible. The failure is that risk is unknown.

Every proportionality rule in admissibility keys off the risk class: how much evidence is enough, which authority suffices, whether a reversal path must exist. Unclassified risk disables proportionality itself.

How it appears

Pipelines that gate a production deploy and a docs publish identically.
Agent tool catalogs with no mutation flags — read and delete presented as interchangeable capabilities.
“Run script” tickets with no impact statement.
Risk fields that exist in the schema and are populated with unknown in every record.

Across actors

Agent

A framework exposes forty tools to an agent with uniform metadata. The boundary cannot distinguish the tool that reads a file from the tool that rotates production credentials.

CI / pipeline

One reusable workflow handles linting, packaging, and production deployment. Its callers inherit a single, undifferentiated gate.

Human operator

A ticket says “run the attached script on prod.” No one states what the script can touch.

Why it defeats admissibility

A boundary that cannot grade risk must either overreact to everything or underreact to everything — and under real delivery pressure, it underreacts. JExec’s conservative default makes ignorance expensive in the right direction: an unclassified execution is treated as irreversible until someone says otherwise, which makes classification the cheap path.

Remediation

Make risk.class mandatory at the boundary; absence is itself a finding, not a default.
Classify tools and actions once at registration time, not per-run under pressure.
Adopt the conservative default: unclassified is handled as irreversible until classified.

In the JExec Record

Primarily affects: risk. The JExec Protocol maps EAF-8 to the consequences above; JExec Check detects it deterministically and links back to this page.