Reference · JAS v0.1 (draft)

JExec Admissibility Standard

The ontology says what can go wrong. The Standard says what good is: four levels grading how governed a system’s executions are before they mutate state.

A JAS level is a property of an execution path — one route by which state gets mutated (a deploy pipeline, an agent’s tool loop, a migration runbook) — not of a company, a product, or a team. A system can honestly say “our production deploys are A2; our agent tool calls are A0.” That sentence is the Standard working as intended.

The four levels

A0 Ungoverned

No admissibility decision exists before execution. Mutations happen because credentials permit them. Whatever governance exists is post-hoc: logs, alerts, incident review. Most automation in the world today — and nearly all agent tool execution — operates at A0.

Characteristic failure: any class in the ontology, discovered after the fact.

A1 Declared

Before execution, the seven fields of the JExec Record are declared: intent, actor, authority, scope, evidence, risk, and intended decision. Nothing is yet verified — but the execution has stated what it is, on the record, in advance. Declaration alone eliminates the silent forms of EAF-1, EAF-5, and EAF-8: an execution can no longer not have an intent, a scope, or a risk class.

Requirements. Every execution on the path declares all seven fields before running; declarations are stored with the execution; mechanism-grade intents (“run script”) are rejected.

A2 Verified

Declarations are checked, not merely present. Actor identity is authenticated (EAF-2). Authority names a source, a verifier, and evidence, and its coverage is compared against the declared scope (EAF-3, EAF-4). Evidence is bound to the artifact and current (EAF-6, EAF-7). A JExec Record is produced for every decision and stored append-only (EAF-10).

Requirements. A1, plus: authenticated per-actor identity (including per-agent identity); verified authority with scope comparison; evidence bound to content hashes or versions with defined validity; a stored record for every decision, including allows.

A3 Enforced

The verdict gates execution. A DENY structurally prevents the mutation; an ESCALATE suspends it until a distinct authority decides. Irreversible classes are gated asymmetrically with declared reversal or review paths (EAF-9). No bypass lane exists that does not itself produce an escalation record.

Requirements. A2, plus: decisions computed by the protocol rules, not ad-hoc judgment; deny blocks, escalate suspends; asymmetric gating for irreversible risk classes; bypass paths emit escalation records; records are append-only and independently retained.

Level summary

Using the Standard honestly

• Grade paths, not organizations. “We are JAS A2” is meaningless; “our production deploy path is A2” is checkable.
• Self-assessment only. JExec is a specification, not a certification authority; there is no JAS certificate, and any product claiming one is misusing the name. See the claims policy.
• A1 is a real achievement. The jump from A0 to A1 — from undeclared to declared — removes more incident surface than any later jump, and costs the least.
• Agents change nothing and everything. The levels apply to an agent’s tool-execution path exactly as to a deploy pipeline. What changes is volume: an A0 human path produces occasional incidents; an A0 agent path produces them at machine speed.

The Standard is published machine-readably at /api/standard.json. To evaluate a single intended execution rather than a path, use JExec Check. To have one of your paths graded by the specification’s author, see the Execution Admissibility Review.

JAS is versioned under the governance policy. Level definitions are appended or revised with version increments, never silently.