Benchmark publication governance

Status: accepted
Decision date: 2026-08-10

B6: independent publication axes

Benchmark publication governance keeps four axes independent:

• Capability maturity describes what a product capability can demonstrate. It is governed by the capability registry and does not imply benchmark publication.
• Publication lifecycle records the benchmark state using exactly experimental, candidate, published, or superseded.
• Artifact kind records an artifact’s role using the governed kind field.
• Artifact sensitivity records custody and publication constraints using the governed sensitivity field.

The benchmark registry also records benchmark_kind, which describes benchmark construction, and evaluation_mode, which describes how evaluation is performed. These are additional benchmark semantics. They do not replace or collapse any of the four governance axes.

undetermined is permitted only in a working discovery inventory before a record enters governance. It is forbidden in curated, resolved, or otherwise governed records. An unclassified record must remain outside those records or fail the applicable gate; uncertainty must not be presented as publication status.

B7: independent Section 13 review

Section 13 benchmark-publication governance, and any change that authorizes external benchmark publication under it, requires independent adversarial review before publication. The review must examine classification vocabulary, axis separation, public/evaluator boundaries, gate evidence, and publication claims. It must not be replaced by author self-review.

The independent review dated 2026-08-10 found two repository blockers:

1. The benchmark reference described lifecycle using terms outside the governed experimental, candidate, published, and superseded vocabulary.
2. The Hugging Face control workflow watched a nonexistent transition filename instead of the authoritative benchmark-transitions.json input.

This branch addresses those blockers through the aligned benchmark reference and workflow trigger. This decision record also preserves the durable B6/B7 owner decisions without adopting the historical Phase 0 inventories or migration index as current repository facts.

B8: bounded Hugging Face v0.14.0 authorization

The first governed Hugging Face refresh treats commit 54a7d1e89f683ade507c3518b3e0c0bfddfbe528 and its 42-file inventory as an immutable remote baseline. It does not retroactively re-authorize, regenerate, delete, or relabel those files.

Authorization is per artifact, not per published benchmark family. The bounded v0.14.0 tranche contains only the nine raw ambiguity-v1 and authority-governance-v1 artifacts enumerated by the publication manifest plus a single dataset-card replacement. Both C08 v2 benchmark identities remain explicitly prohibited. New paths expose the public/evaluator boundary in their directory structure, require an absent remote precondition, and are bound by source digest, byte size, content type, benchmark version, and canonical destination path.

The authorization change remains dry-run-only. Network access, upload capability, deletion, protected-environment evidence, remote integrity evidence, and Viewer validation remain separate gates. A later uploader must consume only the reviewed manifest and use the pinned Hub commit as its compare-and-swap parent.