The agentic governance lifecycle, end to end.

Ten governed stages

Each stage carries its boundary verb — what KYE™ does at that point — and links to the one canonical surface that owns it. This is a projection of the canonical registry, not a second definition. The on-the-wire signed-state sequence lives on the authority lifecycle page.

#	Stage	KYE™	What happens, and where it is owned
1	Intent	Decides	A principal declares a purpose-scoped intent before any action, binding it to a Purpose Permission grant so the act inherits a standing rule.
2	Action Admissibility™	Decides	Before any authority or formal-rule check, KYE™ decides whether the proposed action is admissible into the pipeline at all.
3	Authority Resolution™	Owns	KYE™ resolves the chain of authority behind the act to a single authoritative answer at the point of action. See execution architecture.
4	Delegation and Scope	Owns	KYE™ attenuates authority down the delegation chain and pins the scope each hop may spend.
5	Execution Control	Decides	At the gateway, KYE™ issues the verdict that admits or denies the action and records the Decision Map™ linking inputs to outcome.
6	Evidence Pack™	Emits	KYE™ seals the signed, replayable bundle an auditor verifies offline from public keys alone.
7	Authority Finality™	Owns	KYE™ resolves the act to a sealed, non-repudiable end state. Every act has authority; every authority has finality.
8	Reality Coupling™	Decides	KYE™ detects stable drift — when a still-valid authority has decoupled from the reality it was granted against — and decides whether to revalidate.
9	Contestability	Enables	KYE™ enables a contest by providing the evidentiary substrate. It does not adjudicate. See below.
10	Renewal and Revocation	Emits	KYE™ decides and emits the revocation; the enforcement rail acts on it. Revocations propagate down delegation chains.

Contestability — evidentiary, not adjudicated

When a governed party contests an automated decision, KYE™ supplies what makes the contest provable rather than a matter of opinion: the signed Evidence Pack™ and the Replay Proof any third party re-derives from public keys alone.

• KYE™ enables the contest. It hands the decision-map and replay-proof references to whatever appeal body, regulator or court already holds jurisdiction.
• KYE™ is not a dispute-resolution system. It does not weigh testimony, rule on merits, or settle outcomes. The adjudicator does that; KYE™ makes the record incontestable.
• The record outlives the runtime. A sealed pack is replayable years later from the published key set alone — so a contest raised long after the act still has ground truth to stand on.

This is the canonical surface for the Contestability stage. Its structured record is the dispute registry; the appeal rights that apply are jurisdiction-specific.

Decision Rationale — the why, in contestable terms

A signed Evidence Pack™ proves what happened and who authorised it. It does not, on its own, explain why the decision was reached in terms a citizen, regulator or tribunal can meaningfully contest. The Decision Rationale™ record closes that gap — and it is what an EU AI Act™ Article 13 (transparency) and Article 14 (human oversight) obligation reads.

Record	Question	What it carries
Evidence Pack™	What & who	The signed, replayable bundle — inputs, signed state, signals, signatures — an auditor verifies offline from public keys alone.
Decision Rationale™	Why	Which rule fired, which authority was resolved, which inputs were consumed, the purpose and scope in force, any human-oversight intervention, and the contest path — each in plain language.
Contest path	How to challenge	The route an affected party takes, and the external body holding jurisdiction. Once a contest is raised it becomes a dispute record, described above.

The boundary we hold

• KYE™ explains the governance decision. It records which rule was decisive, on whose authority the act stood, what inputs it consumed, the purpose and scope, and how to contest it.
• KYE™ does not interpret the model. A model's output is consumed as a governed input signal, not opened up — KYE™ does not produce post-hoc statistical interpretability such as feature-attribution scores. The Decision Rationale™ states this boundary in every record it emits.
• KYE™ does not adjudicate. It hands the rationale and the replay-derivable evidence to whatever appeal body, regulator or tribunal already holds jurisdiction. KYE™ enables the contest; the adjudicator decides it.

This is the canonical surface for the Decision Rationale™. Its structured record is kye.decision_rationale.v1, mapped to EU AI Act™ Articles 13, 14 and 86.

Authority-governance conformance ladder

KYE Protocol™ defines five levels of authority-governance conformance, each corresponding to a set of lifecycle stages an implementation governs. An implementation advances the ladder by covering progressively more of the spine.

Level	Name	Stages governed	What it means
L1	Schema-valid Evidence Pack™	Stage 6 — Evidence Pack™	The implementation emits a schema-valid Evidence Pack™ (kye.evidence.decision_map.v1) for every governed act. The minimum evidentiary floor; offline replay is possible.
L2	Authority chain captured	Stages 3–4 — Authority Resolution™ + Delegation	The authority chain (grant → delegation → attenuation) is captured in every Evidence Pack™ and independently verifiable from published key material. Chain-of-custody provable on demand.
L3	Runtime Action Admissibility™ enforced	Stages 1–5 — Intent through Execution Control	Action Admissibility™ is enforced at runtime — out-of-scope action is refused before the side effect commits. Includes Intent binding, admissibility gate, authority resolution, delegation scope, and execution verdict.
L4	Authority Finality™ replayable	Stages 6–7 — Evidence Pack™ + Authority Finality™	Every act resolves to a sealed, signed, non-repudiable end state. The Replay Proof is derivable from public keys alone — no vendor cooperation needed. Finality is the property regulators and auditors cite.
L5	Full spine — Reality Coupling, Contestability, Revocation	All ten stages	Reality Coupling™ detects stable drift; Contestability provides the evidentiary substrate for challenge; Renewal/Revocation propagates down delegation chains. The complete authority governance lifecycle, end to end.

The certification program conformance ladder (L0 Declared → L4 KYE Certified™) governs implementation programme tiers. This authority-governance ladder governs which lifecycle stages an implementation covers. The two ladders are independent and complementary.

Where the other players sit

Adjacent categories each cover a slice of the spine. KYE™ spans all ten stages; each named player below covers one or two, sourced from its own public positioning. For the category-level narrative, see who's in AI governance and the analyst competitive landscape.

Player	Category	Stages covered	Public positioning (cited)
KYE Protocol™	Agentic Governance™	All ten stages	Governs the authority behind every act and resolves it to finality across the whole spine.
Datadog	Observability	Execution Control	LLM Observability monitors, traces and evaluates LLM applications in production.
Arize AI	Model eval	Execution Control · Reality Coupling™	AI observability and LLM evaluation for tracing and troubleshooting agent performance.
Cisco AI Defense (Robust Intelligence)	Model eval	Action Admissibility™	Automated AI validation and runtime safety — red-teaming and guardrails for models.
Credo AI	GRC	Intent	AI governance platform for use-case registration, policy management and framework mapping.
OneTrust	GRC	Intent · Evidence Pack™	AI inventory, risk assessment and policy management against regulatory requirements.
Cerbos	Policy authoring	Authority Resolution™ · Execution Control	Stateless decoupled authorization layer evaluating policy-as-code to allow or deny actions.
Temporal	Enforcement gateway	Execution Control · Renewal/Revocation	Durable execution platform orchestrating reliable, recoverable workflow state transitions.
Lakera	Pre-authorization	Action Admissibility™	Lakera Guard screens prompts and agent inputs for injection, jailbreak and data-leak risk.

Each row's claim is drawn from the linked vendor's own public site. KYE™ consumes these signals as inputs to an authority decision — it does not compete at their altitude.