MCIR: A Canonical Intermediate Representation for Governed Transformation

This working paper introduces MCIR (Meta-Compilation Intermediate Representation) as a canonical, hash-stable representation for governed transformation. MCIR addresses a gap in ordinary software, policy, and execution systems: governance-relevant change is often distributed across source code, binaries, configuration, policies, runtime behavior, and informal documentation, making it difficult to determine when admissibility, authority, transformation semantics, or capability exposure has actually changed. The paper defines governance relevance as a formal obligation: any parameter capable of altering admissibility, authority relations, transformation semantics, or capability exposure must be structurally represented. MCIR then provides a closed, versioned grammar, grammar-scoped structural equivalence, deterministic canonicalization, canonical serialization, and hash-based compressed identity over canonical bytes. The central invariant is that governance-relevant divergence must alter canonical structure. This makes admissibility-relevant change mechanically visible, diffable, and hash-identifiable. The paper distinguishes structural equivalence from broad semantic equivalence, canonical identity from hash identity, and representation from implementation or runtime evidence. The paper also frames MCIR as a semantic commit object: canonical form is the committed governance-bearing structure, hash identity is the compact reference, structural diff is the semantic delta, and grammar version is the commit schema. Worked examples show threshold changes, authority expansion, unordered capability canonicalization, transformation-semantic divergence, and a minimal formal grammar fragment. MCIR is proposed as a representation discipline for AI-native and governance-aware computation. Rather than moving directly from human intent to code or binary output, MCIR provides a canonical layer where admissible structure, authority, capability, and claim boundaries can be represented before lowering into code, binary, protocol behavior, policy execution, or runtime effects.