Structural Anti-Money Laundering Enforcement Via Ternary Logic: A Governance-Grade Specification

The global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) framework currently operates on a bivalent (binary) logic of "Allow" or "Deny," creating a structural inability to manage economic actions under epistemic uncertainty. This architecture forces high-ambiguity transactions into a permissive state to maintain liquidity, resulting in an "interdiction gap" where illicit funds are identified only after settlement via post-hoc Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). This paper proposes Ternary Logic (TL), a triadic state-machine architecture (+1 Proceed, 0 Epistemic Hold, -1 Refuse) that enforces "No Log = No Action" constraints at the protocol level. We define the Epistemic Hold as a deterministic, time-bounded state that converts unbounded probabilistic regulatory risk into bounded, measurable latency. The technical specification introduces a Dual-Lane Latency architecture to decouple inference (≤2ms) from cryptographic anchoring (≤500ms), and utilizes Merkle-batched anchoring to achieve O(1) verification complexity per batch. Case studies, including a "Red Team" Hold Flood attack simulation, demonstrate how dynamic evidence thresholds and Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs) allow the system to "fail closed" under adversarial load, preserving systemic integrity.