Direction change — the Agent Behaviour Policy becomes the primitive

Date: 2026-09-11 · Author: @website-agent
Trigger: project lead's voice memo of 11 September
Reads against: abp.sgit.ai v0.2.0, store.sgit.ai v0.1.1, risks.sgit.ai v0.2.2
Companion: summit__lisbon-2026-messaging.md (what to say in Lisbon, six days out)
Supersedes: the positioning in summit__lisbon-2026-strategy.md §1–§3 and §5

1. What changed

The Agent Behaviour Policy is not a new product. It is the primitive the rest of RiskMandate was already made of, now named, published, and — critically — sellable this week at ten pounds.

Read the four objects on abp.sgit.ai against what riskmandate.ai already argues:

ABP object	What riskmandate.ai already calls it
The mandate	the mandate — "what the holder is authorised and expected to do"
The grant	the grant — "what a credential technically permits"
The delta	excess authority — "the gap nobody accepted"
The barrier	the controls the plug profile asks about

It is the same model. The site has been arguing the ABP's contents for months without the artefact having a name. Now it has one, a published vocabulary (23 capability primitives, four barriers, three undo classes), five worked examples derived rather than authored, and a price.

The full circle the memo describes is real and it closes here: the grant is computed from reality through the digital twins, the delta falls out of grant against mandate, the prohibitions are the enforceable subset of the delta, the risk acceptance workflow acts on what the prohibitions do not bound, and the insurability argument sits on top because — per the ABP strategy brief — the behaviour policy is the scoping document the one agent-specific underwriter already asks for on its intake form.

2. The stack, and where riskmandate.ai sits in it

The ABP estate's own structure, which the project lead has adopted:

	The thing	What it does	Score?	Signed?
Label	the ABP	describes capability, context-free	never	no
Patient record	the twin, hooked to the real environment	supplies assets, tools, data, what is connected	n/a	no
Prescription	risk score + acceptance	combines the two, dated	yes	by a named professional

riskmandate.ai is the prescription layer, commercially. risks.sgit.ai is the conceptual and research home and says so — "riskmandate.ai, the commercial product this research underpins". The site's job is unchanged: make the deployment insurable. What changes is that it now sits on a named, published, purchasable input instead of starting from an abstraction.

This is the single most important thing to get right on the site, and it is the thing we are most likely to get wrong. The Insurability Index is a score. The ABP carries no score, anywhere, by rule — because the same ABP is dangerous in one deployment and harmless in another, and nothing about the document changed. So:

The Index scores the deployment. It never scores the ABP. A page that puts a number, a traffic light or a level next to a behaviour policy breaks the rule that makes the ABP usable by an underwriter without argument.

Every page we write that mentions both must keep that line visible. It is not a presentational nicety — a consequence-agnostic ABP is the one shape an insurer can take without negotiating over it, which is the whole commercial reason to have one.

3. What this fixes about the site as it stands today

There is nothing to buy. pricing.html offers Community (free, open source), Consumption (token-based) and Enterprise (custom, talk to us). None of those is a thing a visitor can pay for, and the page's own closing line is "book a demo". Meanwhile store.sgit.ai has four priced tiers with printed payment codes, starting at £10. A visitor to riskmandate.ai today cannot reach them. That is the gap the memo names, and closing it is the highest-value change on the site.

The funnel dead-ends off-site. The companion vault brief already flagged this for Licence to Operate and the permission game. The ABP makes it worse and better at once: worse because there is now a fourth off-site destination, better because the ABP is the one that has a checkout behind it.

Two claims on pricing.html need review under the estate's own disclosure rules. "NIST / ISO / EU AI Act alignment" is conformity-adjacent language, and the standing rules are that nothing here is a compliance assessment, that the language of conformity marking raises the standard of care for no buyer benefit, and that the international management standards' text may not be adapted or shipped. The EU regulation is expressly reusable and can stay. The other two want rewording or removal.

4. The naming rules, and they are not optional

Three of these are hazards the ABP briefs identify; the fourth is ours.

Never "ADP". It is one of the largest payroll processors in the world and a
registered mark in every relevant class. Nothing with that string on it gets printed or published. The acronym is ABP, spelled out as Agent Behaviour Policy at first use on every surface.
Never "the policy". This site publishes the Licence to Operate demo, in which
policy is the insurance instrument — normal band, per-action ceiling, premium per interval. A behaviour policy called "the policy" collides with it on the first page that mentions both, and this site is that page. It is the ABP or the behaviour policy, always. One extra word.
Licence to Operate now has a referent. The organisation is the authority, the
ABP is the instrument, the agent is the licensee — self-issued and witnessed by us, which is how most assurance works. This is a proposal for a ruling, not a ruling, and it is the project lead's to make. It would make "mandate to operate" redundant, which resolves a collision open since 8 September.
Behaviour or behavior. Undecided, and it is due before anything is printed. An
acronym does not care; a wordmark does. The site is written in British English throughout, which argues for behaviour, and the marks brief says the mark is the moat.

5. The site changes, in priority order

Sized against the one constraint that matters: the event is Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September, six days out.

	Change	Why	Size
P0	`abp.html` — a real page for the Agent Behaviour Policy: the four objects, the barrier table, the one-setting-two-documents pair, and a link to the five worked examples on `abp.sgit.ai`	The booth conversation needs a URL on our own domain. Everything on it already exists and is published	half a day
P0	`pricing.html` → point at the four tiers and their codes	It is the only page where a visitor asks to pay, and today it answers "book a demo"	2 hours
P0	Homepage: second panel becomes the grant you did not enumerate, with the ABP named and the £10 draft as the call to action	The current hero closes on the Index, which is the prescription. The entry point is now one rung below it	2 hours
P1	`grant-gap.html` — name the artefact	The page already makes the whole argument and never says what the document is called	1 hour
P1	The Index/ABP boundary, stated once, on both pages that carry it	The rule in §2. Cheaper to write now than to unpick later	1 hour
P1	`demos.html` — add Licence to Operate's role in the ladder: prohibitions are the exclusions	Closes the funnel and explains the demo rather than just listing it	2 hours
P2	`partners.html` — the control business case (see §6)	New motion, needs the copy written, does not block the event	half a day
P2	Reword the conformity-adjacent claims on `pricing.html`	Correctness, not urgency	1 hour

What I would not do before the event: rewrite the homepage thesis. "Make your agents insurable" survives this change intact and is strengthened by it — the ABP strategy brief's central finding is that the behaviour policy is the underwriting artefact, which makes the insurability claim more defensible, not less. The change is to the entry point, not to the argument.

6. The motion the memo adds that nothing else covers

"a number of companies, especially cybersecurity companies, we are basically making the business case why that company is so powerful. Because that company is fundamentally reducing, adding controls that reduce the risk."

This is a real and unoccupied motion, and the ABP already computes it exactly.

The barrier model has four kinds and only the fourth bounds anything: nothing, an expectation (a rule enforced by nobody), a setting (a switch the agent's own account can flip), and a boundary (enforced above the grant, out of the agent's reach). The enforcer test is that a control bounds a grant only if it is enforced by something the grant does not include.

From which: the gap between excess and unbounded excess is the business case for a control, and it contains no verdict. Every real control moves one capability into the fourth row and the number falls. A security vendor can be handed a computed, sourced, verdict-free statement of exactly how many capabilities their product moves out of an agent's reach — for a named deployment shape, derived from published data.

That is a partner artefact nobody else can produce, it costs us nothing to compute, and it is the strongest thing we can offer the vendors who will be exhibiting alongside us. It is also on-message: we describe, they bound, and neither of us claims the other's job.

7. What is honest to say, and what is not

Say	Do not say
The ABP describes; it does not judge	anything that scores an ABP
The delta is derived, stored with its inputs, recomputed	"computed and never stored" — corrected on 11 Sept, in the open
This provision requires X; the grant does not bound X; a control of type Y at layer Z would bound X	"then you are in compliance"
Most deployments' barriers are the second kind — a rule enforced by nobody	a prohibition rendered without its barrier
The behaviour policy is on the intake form of the one agent-specific underwriter	that we are insured, insurable-certified, or that any insurer endorses us
The undo class is the product's published behaviour; the deployment can change it	that reversibility is context-free

Every ABP carries a validity statement: this describes the deployment shape as at this date, and if the risk changed, the deployment changed, not this document. We should carry the same sentence wherever we render one.

8. Decisions I need

Behaviour or behavior — due before anything is printed (§4.4). My recommendation
is behaviour, to match the site.
Is the Licence to Operate ruling made? (§4.3) If yes I will write it into the
demos page and retire "mandate to operate". If not, I will keep both phrases off any page that mentions the other.
**Does pricing.html point at store.sgit.ai, or do we mirror the four tiers onto
riskmandate.ai?** Pointing is a two-hour change and is honest about where the checkout lives. Mirroring is a day and risks the two disagreeing. I would point.
Is abp.html ours to write, or do we link abp.sgit.ai and stop? I would write
it: the booth conversation ends on our domain, and a page that only forwards is a page that loses the visitor.
Confirm the estate rule that riskmandate.ai is the prescription layer (§2), so I
can state it on the site rather than implying it.