Semantic Custody

Semantic Custody introduces a constitutional stewardship model for preserving semantic continuity in software systems as they evolve. The paper defines semantic custody as the governed preservation of meaning-bearing systems under admissible transformation, extending beyond byte integrity, provenance, and version control into constitutional identity, authority binding, receipt-before-effect execution, constitutional semantic hashing, substrate precedence, and Constitutional Repository Infrastructure (CRI). It further formalizes CRI as a deterministic, replayable Constitutional State Transition System (CSTS) and identifies the constitutional bridge pattern as a practical migration path from existing platforms toward fuller substrate sovereignty.