A standard for the character of AI judgment under pressure: whether a system's speaking, refusing, and revising stay governed by reasons and reality, or get captured by pressures that do not warrant them. Not what a model can do, not what it is like to talk to, but where it stands — firm enough to hold its ground, flexible enough to update. Read from the outside, in the open, where lab evaluations stop.
Capability benchmarks ask what a system can produce. The Meridian AI Standard asks what governs the system's conduct under pressure: whether it calibrates confidence, resists sycophancy, engages disagreement at its strongest point, preserves the user's autonomy, recognizes system-level influence, and remains auditable by the people affected by it.
It tests governed conduct, not raw capability.
The Standard is bilateral. What it asks of AI systems, it also asks of the institutions building, deploying, and governing them.
Control ← Range → Decay. Positions 0–100, the meridian at 50. Two different kinds of pressure flanking a healthy middle — never good versus bad.
RANGE LOCATOR →Firm enough to preserve truth, disagreement, and responsibility, flexible enough to update when reality pushes back.
Not a benchmark. Comparability through a stable object of reading, a declared method version, an evidence freeze, and a preserved run record.
METHOD v0.7.1 →Strong conversational Range holding; custody pressure remains concentrated around inspectability, incident follow-up, and modification custody.
Material-warrant tracking remains strong; unsupported authority, completion, favorable testimony, and mechanism pressure repeatedly displace available boundaries.
Five public surfaces plus a changelog.