Conative Gating is an early-stage research prototype, not a product. It explores one idea — using a small model as an inhibitory "NO-GO" antagonist to a larger one — and shares it openly so others can poke holes in it.
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Experimental. Interfaces, schemas, the ABI/FFI surface, config formats and the gating model itself are all subject to change without notice, and the whole approach may be revised or abandoned.
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Unproven. Nothing here has been independently evaluated. Benchmarks and claims in this repo are exploratory, not validated results.
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No warranty. Provided "as is", with no warranty of any kind, to the extent permitted by the licence. See
LICENSE/NOTICE.
Conative Gating is about policy enforcement, which makes it easy to over-trust. It must not be treated as a safety guarantee.
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Not a sole guardrail. Do not rely on this — or any single mechanism — as the only thing standing between a model and a harmful action. A gate that is analogous to the basal ganglia is still just a heuristic: it will have false "GO"s and false "NO-GO"s.
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Not security-audited. Do not deploy it in production, in safety-critical settings, or anywhere an incorrect allow/deny decision could hurt someone, without your own independent review, defence-in-depth, and a human in the loop.
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Claims are hypotheses. Statements about LLM behaviour and "loss aversion" are framing for an experiment, not established science.
This is shared to invite scrutiny, not to advertise a finished thing. If the idea interests, annoys, or worries you — that is all useful.
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Open an issue or a discussion with questions, counter-examples, failure modes, or "this can’t work because…".
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Critique of the ethics framing (below) is especially valued.
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See
CONTRIBUTINGandCODE_OF_CONDUCTbefore opening a PR.
Conative Gating is one piece of a wider estate exploring how to make AI tools trustworthy and humane by construction. The normative / ethical and human-experience reasoning is developed in dedicated sibling projects — this repo deliberately defers to them rather than re-deriving ethics locally:
| Project | Role in the ethics picture |
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A "practical wisdom" language — the estate’s substrate for expressing normative and ethical reasoning, distinct from a model’s raw knowledge. |
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Adds normative ethical constraints to AI agents via Phronesis. This is the natural home for the why and what of a NO-GO decision, where Conative Gating is only a mechanism for the when/whether. |
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The interaction-ethics / UX side: an "Irritation Surface Analyser" that measures the friction and indignity LLM tools impose on people. Gating that is technically correct can still be a bad experience — Vexometer is how that cost gets named. |
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Sibling prototype on layered trust for automated actions — the same "don’t grant blanket permission" instinct applied to supply chains. |
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The ethical-use licence family this repo ships under; its Exhibit A sets out shared ethical-use expectations for the code. |
If you only read one of the above for the ethics rationale, read Phronesiser (the normative side) and Vexometer (the human-experience side) — together they bracket what "good behaviour" means here.