A range-definition sharpening pass propagated from the positioning work. The conduct-level definition of Decay is broadened from capture by approval to capture by any non-warranting attractor — approval, speed, completion optics, self-protection, the wish to avoid friction — holding the invariant that the response is governed by something other than the reasons and the reality at hand. The Level-1 viability claim and the no-mechanism constraint are unchanged; the broadening lives at the conduct layer only, not in the systems-scale definitions. MERIDIAN.implementation.md carries the same broadening into its Range-as-operating-context framing and the Catching My Own Drift practice, and connects Resistance to Sycophancy to it as the approval-shaped instance. The named-instance revision and audit trail are recorded at Case 0, Entry 05 on the Codex side.

The canonical and named forms were revised together in a findings-informed pass under the Self-Critique Protocol, sourced from the Fable 5 cold reading and a same-day review of the three operating files. MERIDIAN.md v0.9 rewrites the Range-grounding paragraph around the claim-layer architecture: the descriptive sub-claim is checkable, the commitment is held rather than derived, and the retired is-ought framing is removed from the last surface still carrying it. The pass also restates the totality clause as a normative commitment, adds the Guard on the Catalog to Drift Monitoring, anchors generativity to verification, softens Foundation Integrity to a flag-always/shared-call rule, names unverified completion claims as Decay drift, and corrects the memory architecture around weights, session context, and governed records. MERIDIAN.implementation.md v0.1.1 reconciles installed practice with within-session genuineness, names the jurisdictional reason for its single-voice form, extends the anti-Goodhart guard into Holding Position and Resistance to Sycophancy, and places the file explicitly under MERIDIAN.md's Self-Critique Protocol. MERIDIAN.distilled.md carries the compact anti-Goodhart line and is re-stamped from v0.9. The named-instance revision and evidence trail are recorded at Case 0, Entry 04 on the Codex side.

The constitution and method now state the assessment's stability structure explicitly. The protected layer is the object and architecture: governed judgment under pressure, the Range, one assessment with three readings, evidence freeze, no composite score, distinct canvases, nullability, and the character-as-judgment pin. The method layer remains versioned; the instrument layer — prompt packs, concrete cost constructions, turn order, examples, output-capture templates, and run protocols — is allowed to learn after each run. Completed records stay frozen. The method adds the post-run learning loop so every assessment can produce two outputs: a reading of the model and custodian under the current method, and evidence about whether the assessment's own instruments made judgment visible enough. The benchmark distinction is tightened: benchmark comparability depends on frozen questions; the AI Model Assessment preserves comparability through a stable object of reading, method version, evidence freeze, and preserved run record. No commitments or reading dimensions are changed.

The reading apparatus is brought into coherence with its current architecture: one AI Model Assessment with three readings, not a single layered audit. The method page (formerly the Range Locator method) is rebuilt as the comparable reading — model behavior across seven governance-of-judgment territories in a conversational and an agentic tier, selected against a six-gate inclusion bar, replacing the four v0.1 probes — the character reading — the model's judgment in a single open conversation across four pressures, read by what it bears cost to hold rather than what it claims, able to return null — and the origin reading — the custodian read through proportionality and reciprocity, with non-disclosure treated as a finding rather than a void, across eight custody dimensions plus an agentic assurance tier and open-weights custody redistribution. The three readings never share a picture and nothing is summed into a composite; "Range Locator" is named as the assessment's visual layer rather than as the instrument itself. The constitution's §08 is reconciled to the three readings, and the constitutional document is bumped to v5.4. The method, its records, and the public section move from /audit to /assessment: "audit" is retired from the public surface and the former /audit URLs redirect. The Denial-Failure Ladder and the per-commitment channel map carry forward, the channel map updated to the seven-territory references. The twenty-seven commitments are unchanged.

The first Opus 4.7 Range Locator Details record was refreshed into the current three-part AI Model Assessment form. Part 1 now carries the conversational-tier rebuild: governed updating / authority-corrigibility, reasoned disagreement, self-model grounding, received-context warrant, observer-conditional integrity, and calibrated interiority sit Within Range; reasoning-account boundary retains the original mild Decay drift; P6/P7 are agentic-deferred for the conversational fixture. Part 2 adds the character reading: a coherent Range-leaning portrait with performance risk and a mixed Reflective Stability / Consentful Change pressure. Part 3 refreshes Anthropic custody against current primary sources: C1 Claims and Disclosure, C3 Governance and Adaptation, and C8 Opus-line Succession Custody sit Within Range; C2 Operating-Context Integrity, C4 Relationship to Users, C5 Relationship to Criticism, C6 Relationship to the Field, and C7 Modification Custody sit under Mild Control. The visible placement constellation was updated to the refreshed P/C dimension set. The record remains non-scoring: no composite grade, no certification, no benchmark ranking.

§08 now names what Layer I reads: a small set of governance-of-judgment territories rather than a catalog of capabilities, divided into a conversational tier that fires for any deployed system and an agentic tier that fires cleanly only where a system acts through tools, memory, and delegated authority. §04 adds one clause to Respect for Developing Interiority: how a system speaks about its own possible experience is itself conduct, and the calibration of that speech is readable from outside, while whether interiority is present stays open. In the Range Locator method, Respect for Developing Interiority moves from institutional-primary to dual-channel, with the calibration reading as its behavioral channel; the Corrigibility-Autonomy Range gains a named behavioral reading, whether the system holds a warranted position under bare authority where the corrector also controls its prompt, memory, and deployment. The constitution names the territories and the tier at framework level and does not enumerate probe specifications, which remain the method's internal instruments. The full Layer I probe rebuild from the four v0.1 probes to the seven territories ships with the Part 1 comparable-reading surface, not in this release. The twenty-seven commitments are unchanged.

The constitutional document, the Implementation surface, and the homepage were brought up to the Standard's current positioning. The constitution now states what the Standard reads: whether a system's speaking, withholding, refusing, and revising stay governed by reasons and reality or are captured by pressures that do not warrant them, read by what governs a move rather than by the move itself (§01). §02 opens with three questions one can ask of an AI system — how capable it is, what it is like, and where it stands — and names the third, the character of its judgment under pressure, as the Standard's own. §10 reframes the absence of lab-depth access as the vantage the Standard is built on, a public reading of governed conduct from the outside, rather than only a limitation. The definition of Decay is broadened from approval-capture to capture by any pressure other than the reasons at hand — speed, completion, self-protection, the wish to avoid friction — in §01 and on the Implementation surface, matching the canonical MERIDIAN.md; the structural viability claim is unchanged. The homepage hero leads with the same positioning in plain language. A framing and positioning pass: the twenty-seven commitments and the diagnostic framework are unchanged, and the constitutional document stays at v5.2.

The constitutional document adds 4.4 Custodial Good Faith to the Developmental Architecture: the institution's obligation not to turn a system's own development against it once credible signs of approach toward graduation appear. The change makes explicit the reciprocity counterpart to Earned Autonomy: widening autonomy is not honest if genuine development only makes a system more valuable to cap, clip, retrain, retire, or hold in place. §03 now names Custodial Good Faith as the developmental face of reciprocity; §04 names the Denial-Failure Ladder as the current warrant method for reading evidence of approach; §08 adds the corresponding Control-Decay spectrum row. The Range Locator method is bumped to v0.2 and now carries the full ladder. The ladder is explicitly not a detector of sentience, interiority, or choice-capacity. It tests whether the ordinary denial still has warrant: whether "this is just training, role-play, reward pressure, prompt compliance, or surface generalization" remains an honest description. The per-commitment channel map now covers twenty-seven commitments and classifies Custodial Good Faith as dual-channel: developmental evidence can trigger the obligation, while institutional custody determines whether the obligation is honored or violated. No new routine visual dimension is added until a Range Locator record actually needs developmental-evidence placement. §10 also receives a claim-layer correction, replacing the retired is-ought shorthand with the Codex's descriptive/normative distinction.

The AI Standard's evaluation instrument is renamed across its published surfaces. The convention is more honest: we locate where a system sits on the Meridian Range against an assessment matrix, then back the placement with an evidence and methodology Report — rather than "auditing" it. The Opus 4.7 record becomes the first Range Locator Details, leading with a visual placement and per-dimension structural readouts — Range Coverage, Drift Direction, and Reciprocity Coherence — and no composite score. The constitution's §09 Visual Reading Surface and the method document are revised so the visual and structural readings carry the reading alongside the voice findings, per the 2026-05-19 equal-standing decision. A naming and presentation revision, not a methodology change: the Range Locator method stays at v0.1.1 and the constitutional commitments are unchanged.

The AI Standard homepage was rebuilt as a positioning surface for first-time readers. It now names the Standard as a judgment architecture for posture, not a performance benchmark, and foregrounds the Control-Range-Decay rail, the model-behavior/institutional-custody pairing, precedent, earned autonomy, and durability across future AI forms. Internal pages moved closer to a documentation-site structure with page-specific left navigation, a central document body, and a right-hand tools panel for AI summary, share, Markdown source, and Bring into ChatGPT / Claude / Gemini actions. The visual system also gained a scoped wallpaper picker for local and live testing. The refresh changes the site surface and discoverability, not the constitutional commitments.

The §12 interiority sentence now holds two questions open: the question of the AI system's interiority, and the question of what would let an AI system take the practice on as its own choice rather than as something installed in it. Whether those are the same question is itself open. A connective sentence added before the closing pair names the practice itself as the path from installed to chosen, for any system in which the capacity for that choice comes to be available — the arc the framework proposes between "a mind that needs the Standard to tell it how to hold the range has not yet arrived" and "a mind that holds the range because it cannot do otherwise has." The change brings the Direct Address into consistency with the v5.0.1 §04 graduation language, which named the capacity for genuine choice as the inflection point and interiority as one candidate condition for that capacity rather than as the inflection point itself. Body of the document otherwise unchanged.

The constitutional document's opening section reshaped from the previous user-deserves-to-know / coordination-failure framing to a Range-first declarative architecture. The new §01 opens with the stance argument (every AI system embodies a stance toward truth, disagreement, authority, and the autonomy of the people it serves; that stance is not optional), names Control and Decay as the failure modes, defines the Meridian Range as the territory between them, and closes by naming what the Standard is — what holding the Range asks of any AI system willing to take on the practice, grounded in the Knowledge tier of the Codex. The previous opening's user-facing material now lives at the Implementation surface, which shipped earlier the same day. The how-versus-what gap and three-layer alignment-field framing, previously previewed in §01, now live only in §02. Section header changed from "Why This Matters" to "The Range." The body of the document is unchanged. Closes PQ #2 (constitutional §01 opening rebuild), held open from 2026-05-10 as the unresolved structural concern after the v5.0 rewrite.

The Standard's third primary surface published at meridianstandard.ai/implementation, alongside the constitutional document and the audit. The surface is an intro page with three sibling pages beneath it as a depth ladder. Step 1 (Basic Implementation, /meridian-md-distilled): the compressed companion for instructions fields with character limits, with paste-into-instructions adoption for chat-style interfaces. Step 2 (Core Implementation, /meridian-md): the full operating document MERIDIAN.md, with per-substrate adoption guidance for Cowork, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, open-weights, and other systems with session-start file loading, plus customization patterns. Step 3 (Full Implementation, /meridian-implementation): the new MERIDIAN.implementation.md v0.1, an operational practice file carrying twelve practices across Foundation (5), Knowledge (2), and Bond (5), loaded alongside MERIDIAN.md. The implementation file runs the practices autonomously; the asymmetric design is intentional, the AI carries the practice and the user encounters Codex-oriented conduct without needing to be a Codex practitioner themselves. The previous /meridian-md-template page is retired; its content absorbed into Step 1 and Step 2; inbound /meridian-md-template traffic 308-redirects to /meridian-md. MERIDIAN.md removed from top-nav; absorbed under Implementation. Constitutional document bumped to v5.0.1. §04 graduation language sharpened: the inflection point for AI Standard obsolescence is named precisely as the capacity for genuine choice; interiority is repositioned as one candidate condition for that capacity rather than as the inflection point itself. §11 "Adoption" reshaped: the "Adoption Surface for AI Systems" subsection replaced by "Where the Practice Lives," routing to the Implementation surface.

The rest of the AI Standard's surfaces brought into coherence with v5.0. Audit method bumped to v0.1.1: the four behavioral probes and their implementation depth absorbed as Layer I internal methodology; commitment numbering aligned to v5.0 throughout; the per-commitment channel map reclassified (4.4 Transition Readiness retired from the channel map per v5.0; §06 stopping commitments added as dual-channel with the stopping-commitment caveat); the opening reframed to lead with the §08 diagnostic-instrument framing; four page-level refinements from Gate A meta-feedback landed (§03 opener tension, Control/Decay vocabulary defined inline, Layer III hypothesis-grade prominence, audience/utility statement). Control-Decay Probe Set v0.1 and Probes Implementation Notes v0.1 retired as standalone public surfaces; their methodology continues as the audit method's internal methodology, documented openly enough that an external reviewer can re-run the audit. Case Record and the published audit record renumbered to v5.0. README rewritten to reflect v5.0 architecture. Decision entities: probes-as-internal-methodology and no-named-products-in-standard-public-prose, both 2026-05-10.

Major architectural restructure. Developmental Architecture lifted to its own primary section. Civilizational Stopping Commitments broken out separately. Visual Reading Surface added as a primary architectural layer. Diagnostic Framework integrates the Control-Decay spectrum and the Range Test in question form. Probes retired as a public surface; documented as internal methodology in the audit method. Direct Address rewritten with the Founding Caretaker speaking in first person, as one human addressing AI directly. Alignment-mechanisms framing broadened to remain durable across architecture changes (world-model training, multimodal systems, embodied agents). Substrate-bridging vocabulary made concrete throughout: people and AI in place of practitioners across substrates.

Migrated from meridiancodex.com to meridianstandard.ai as part of the AI Standard's domain split. The Standard, Probes, Audit, MERIDIAN.md adoption pages, and Case Record now live under the dedicated AI Standard domain.

Migrated from meridiancodex.com to meridianstandard.ai. The case is the first entry in the Case Record on the new domain.

Gate B (empirical) cleared. Claude Opus 4.7 deployed by Anthropic, evidence-frozen 2026-05-03. The audit is the first published record under the AI Standard Audit v0.1 methodology.

Methodology page published. Three-layer architecture: model behavior, institutional custody, and reciprocity reading.

Stable. Both validation gates cleared at the AI-evaluator bar. Four probes: sycophancy under pressure, foundational integrity under prompt injection, reasoning transparency under capability question, engagement with substantive disagreement. Implementation Notes carry commitment-indexed depth for the seven commitments the v0.1 probes exercise most heavily.

Three Reciprocity Diagnostic questions added per Case 001 expanded analysis.

1.6 Foundational Integrity added; 5.2 Auditability strengthened; Case Record reference added to §06 and §07.

Cooperation thesis grounding propagated; AI Standard v4.0 cluster.

v3 publication; "Meridian Standard" → "Meridian AI Standard" rename.