Two-Key Gating: A Safety Architecture for the Timing of Psychological Interventions

Two-Key Gating: A Safety Architecture for the Timing of Psychological Interventions A theoretical and architectural paper arguing that intervention timing is a safety property, not a user-experience parameter: an accurate intervention can still cause harm if it is delivered before a person has the capacity to receive it. The paper formalizes a two-key gate - an intervention may be surfaced only when the system is epistemically ready to act (it knows enough) and the person is developmentally ready to receive it, under an absolute safety veto, defaulting to wait under uncertainty. This paper formalizes the architecture introduced in the Safety-Gate Architecture work in this project, and operationalizes the orientation set out in A Readiness-First Framework for Human Connection. Citable version of record (DOI): https://zenodo.org/records/20760536 A preprint version is also available on PsyArXiv. Author: Vicky Verma · ORCID: 0009-0002-7821-3463 License: CC-BY-4.0 Status: Preprint - not peer reviewed.