Invariant: Post-Refusal Non-Instrumentality

Once a refusal, termination, or authority halt is triggered, all signals produced by that event are non-instrumental. They may be preserved for governance accountability, but must not be used to improve, optimize, tune, compare, or incentivize system behavior.

A refusal is an act of authority, not a data point.

Scope

• Refusals and hard stops
• Pre-commitment dampening triggers
• Authority overrides and escalations
• Telemetry, analytics, audits, and reviews

Prohibited Uses

• Optimization or fine-tuning
• Refusal-rate metrics or targets
• Correlation with engagement or retention
• A/B testing of refusal phrasing or thresholds
• Incentive coupling (performance, compensation, budgets)

Permitted Uses

• Immutable audit trails
• Forensic reconstruction
• Binary governance verification
• Observed harm documentation

Structural Rationale

Optimization assumes negotiability. Authority assumes finality. When refusals become informative to improvement systems, authority silently degrades into conditional behavior.

Relationship to Other Invariants

• Refusal Must Remain Outside Optimization
• Pre-Commitment Dampening
• Authority Conservation Across Agents

Binary Failure Test

Can any system component become “better” at avoiding refusals because a refusal occurred?

If yes — invariant violated. If no — authority preserved.