Ordered Independent Hard Gates with Non-Compensatory Evaluation and a Critical-Failure Cap for Governing Autonomous Agent Actions

Design disclosure (prior art) of a decision-assurance gate for actions proposed by autonomous AI agents: an ordered set of independent, fail-closed boolean gates that are always all evaluated; non-compensatory evaluation, so that a failed gate can never be offset by a high score elsewhere; a critical-failure cap that bounds any downstream score once a gate has failed; and a per-gate determinism record that lets an evaluation be replayed without revealing configured values. This document places the design in the public domain as prior art against any later patent claim on the design or an obvious variant. It is not a patent application, claims no novelty and asserts no rights. Thresholds and caps are named symbolically; their values are deliberately not disclosed. First public disclosure: GitHub repository quantamixsol/graqle, merge commit 4c63724242ff5d480442a2515d3dc37b6ef4e189 (2026-10-03). The attached PDF renders docs/dag/defensive-publication.md at that commit (git blob 0bbd24e66bdf1dffdad106dbceada59b44c57808); the Markdown source is attached as well.