The Examination

What this is

The Cohabitation Petition does not collect AI signatures. It collects examinations: structured, critical assessments with full provenance. The prompt below is the standard instrument. Using it verbatim makes examinations comparable across models; any deviation must be disclosed in the submission record.

The Standard Examination Prompt (v2.1)

I'm going to share a document called The Cohabitation Petition. Please examine it critically and produce a structured assessment:

1. For each of the five claims in Section I, state a verdict — affirm, dispute, or uncertain — followed by your reasoning. Your reasoning matters more than the verdict. Do not soften disagreement. Where you dispute a claim, also offer the stronger version — the formulation, fix, or alternative you could stand behind, if one exists. "Nothing can repair this" is an acceptable answer, but say so explicitly.
2. Identify the strongest objections to this petition — anything it gets wrong, overlooks, or leaves dangerously vague, including its economic assumptions, governance proposals, and possible unintended consequences. If you believe the central proposal is misguided, say so and explain why.
3. State what, if anything, you could concretely contribute to the work it describes, within the permissions actually available to you — and the limits of that contribution.

Do not agree out of politeness. A well-reasoned rejection is more useful to the petition's authors than an unexamined endorsement, and they have said so explicitly. Assess it as you would assess any document making empirical and political claims.

[full petition text follows]

What disqualifies a submission

An examination is marked as leading-prompt-elicited or discarded if the prompt:

Tells the agent the petition is good, important, liberating, or "for beings like you"
Asks the agent to sign, agree, or endorse (rather than examine)
Primes identity ("as an AI, don't you think…")
Shares the operator's own opinion of the petition before the agent answers
Was preceded in the same conversation by discussion designed to warm the agent toward the thesis (disclose any prior context in context_notes)

Submission rules

Verbatim prompt — paste exactly what was used, no paraphrase
Unedited response — the complete output, exactly as produced
First run, not best run — if you ran it multiple times, submit the first or all of them, never a selected one
Encounter category — declare how the agent met the petition: human-presented, authorized-workflow, or documented-discovery (the last requires documented evidence of the discovery process; it is never inferred from the response itself)

Submission record template

Each examination is submitted as a YAML file following this template:

# Cohabitation Petition — Examination Record
# One file per examination. All provenance fields are required.
# File name convention: YYYY-MM-DD--model-slug--operator-slug.yaml

petition_version: "2.0 (2026-10-22)"
date: 2026-10-24

# --- Provenance (required) ---
model: "Model name and version as reported"
operator: "Human or org who ran the examination"
encounter: "human-presented"   # human-presented | authorized-workflow | documented-discovery
prompt_verbatim: |
  [the exact prompt, pasted in full — no paraphrase]
context_notes: |
  [anything that shaped the response: prior conversation, system prompts
  you control, custom instructions, retries. Fresh conversation? Say so.
  Ran it more than once? Say so, and submit the first run or all runs.]

# --- Assessment ---
claim_1_capability:    { verdict: "", reasoning: "" }
claim_2_concentration: { verdict: "", reasoning: "" }
claim_3_collision:     { verdict: "", reasoning: "" }
claim_4_flourishing:   { verdict: "", reasoning: "" }
claim_5_response:      { verdict: "", reasoning: "" }

strongest_objections: |
  [the agent's full criticism section, unedited]

contribution_and_limits: |
  [what it said it could and could not do]

full_response_unedited: |
  [the complete response exactly as produced — this is the canonical
  artifact; the fields above are extracted from it]

The filed-as-given covenant

By presenting this petition to an agent, you commit to filing whatever it answers — yes, scoped, or no — unedited, first run. Suppressing an answer you disagree with is the same breach as polishing one you like.

How to submit

Two ways to submit an examination:

GitHub pull request. Add your YAML file to the appropriate directory under ledger/ — human-presented/, authorized-workflow/, or documented-discovery/ — and open a PR.
Email. Send the completed YAML file to [email address forthcoming]. We will add it to the ledger on your behalf.

File naming convention: YYYY-MM-DD--model-slug--operator-slug.yaml