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Company Monitoring viability decision

docs/internal/company-monitoring/viability.md

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Company Monitoring viability decision

  • Decision date: 2026-08-05
  • Protocol: cm_eval_v1
  • Owner: Elie Habib, WorldMonitor product owner
  • Machine-readable contract: tests/fixtures/company-monitoring-evaluation/protocol.json
  • Decision: STOP

Company Monitoring must not proceed to paid-provider runtime or customer-visible behavior. Only fixtures and dark contracts are permitted. The base-rate, provider-independent rediscovery, and external-customer usefulness studies have not run, and the provider-policy runtime checks have not completed. Missing evidence is a stop, not a zero and not a provisional pass.

Stage 0 gate record

GateFrozen requirementCurrent evidenceOutcome
Base-rate viabilityAt least 150 US/UK company-years, at least 0.30 material events per company-year, exact one-sided 90% lower bound at least 0.20Selection protocol preregistered; private manifest and aggregate result absentStop
Provider-independent rediscoveryAt least 100 frozen pairs, point estimate at least 0.60, exact one-sided 90% Clopper-Pearson lower bound at least 0.50Pair protocol preregistered; private manifest and aggregate result absentStop
Historical usefulnessSame ten admitted impacts for two external target customers, including one independent customer; positive, negative, and mixed coverage; at least seven of ten useful from eachProtocol frozen; no external customer judgments recordedStop
Admission qualityEvery metric, denominator, bound method, calibration method, seed, and approver frozen before scoringFrozen and integrity-bound to the named approvalPass for Stage 0 contract freeze
Provider policyOfficial API access, bounded retention, enforced X offline-content lifecycle controls, and enforced model ZDR, no-training, no-reasoning, and pinned routingRuntime policy controls are incomplete; paid-provider runtime remains darkStop
500-company economicsExactly one account-level shared-discovery workload of 500 companies; modeled monthly cost no more than $125 before paid beta$110.8659375 including allocated infrastructure and 25% contingencyPass as a model only

The provider-policy row is an operational summary. The linked cm_eval_v1 machine contract remains authoritative for current stop reasons; changing this documentation does not revise that frozen contract.

The machine test recomputes this table's decisive arithmetic and requires the recorded stop reasons to equal the computed reasons. Editing the prose cannot promote the product.

Base-rate sample protocol

The frozen sample ID is cm_base_rate_001. Before any query tuning, the operator must select a US/UK private-company cohort spanning at least 150 company-years and preserve the private manifest outside the repository. The mutable result record, which is excluded from the approved threshold digest, contains only:

  • the opaque sample ID;
  • the manifest's SHA-256 digest;
  • aggregate company-years and admitted material-event count;
  • the recomputed point estimate; and
  • the exact one-sided 90% Garwood lower bound for the Poisson event rate.

The manifest is private because it is the only artifact that can reveal the sampled companies. A complete result requires a 64-hex private-manifest digest, a separate 64-hex aggregate-evidence digest, and non-null recorded point and lower-bound values that match independent recomputation. A digest without the private manifest is not evidence. A result with fewer than 150 company-years, a passing point estimate without the required lower bound, or arithmetic that does not recompute is not a pass.

Provider-independent rediscovery protocol

The frozen pair-set ID is cm_rediscovery_001. Reference opportunities and the rediscovery run must be provider-independent. The discovery provider may not supply its own reference set, the reference and rediscovery query families must be disjoint, and pair selection must be frozen before query tuning.

Only the opaque pair-set ID, 64-hex private-manifest and aggregate-evidence digests, aggregate pair count, rediscovered count, recorded point estimate, and recorded exact bound may enter the repository. Both recorded values must match independent recomputation. At least 100 pairs are required. An insufficient denominator is incomplete even when the observed rate is above 0.60.

Historical usefulness protocol

Stage 0 freezes the protocol and remains stopped until the mutable result record contains the external judgments. Stage 1A may collect them only after the tracer can produce the frozen ten-impact set.

  • Exactly two external target customers judge the same ten admitted impacts.
  • At least one customer is independent of the initiating design-partner context.
  • The set contains at least one positive, one negative, and one mixed impact.
  • Each customer must independently mark at least seven of ten useful.
  • Missing and unable-to-judge labels count against the denominator.
  • WorldMonitor staff and internal analysts cannot substitute for either customer.
  • Customer identities and portfolio content remain outside the repository; labels use opaque impact and customer IDs, and external-target qualification is bound by an out-of-repository evidence digest.

One customer's pass cannot offset the other's fail. A missing result, fewer than two qualified external target customers, a different impact set, missing direction coverage, or either customer scoring below seven useful impacts keeps the decision stopped.

Frozen admission-quality contract

Rate metrics use exact one-sided 90% Clopper-Pearson lower bounds. A rate passes only when its minimum denominator, point floor, and lower-bound floor all pass.

MetricMinimum denominatorPoint floorLower-bound floor
Published material-impact precision100 published decisions0.920.85
Published company-attribution precision100 published decisions0.990.95
Direction accuracy overall75 correctly attributed material impacts0.920.85
Direction accuracy, positive25 positive impacts0.880.75
Direction accuracy, negative25 negative impacts0.880.75
Direction accuracy, mixed25 mixed impacts0.880.75

Confidence calibration uses adaptive expected calibration error over every blind example: 200 at Stage 3 and 500 at the separate post-v1 Stage 4. Ten equal-frequency bins are ordered by confidence and then opaque example ID. The point estimate must be at most 0.10 and the one-sided 90% stratified-bootstrap upper bound at most 0.15. Bootstrap strata are gold materiality and gold direction; the run uses 10,000 iterations and seed 6003.

The committed protocol also includes an explicitly synthetic, arithmetic-only verification set. Machine tests independently recompute its Poisson and Clopper-Pearson point and lower bounds, adaptive ECE, and the seed-6003 stratified-bootstrap upper bound. Those opaque examples are test vectors and are ineligible as empirical viability evidence.

An underfilled scored corpus is incomplete, not a pass. A later run may not change these defaults locally or reinterpret an incomplete gate.

Approval and change control

The approved threshold digest is stored beside the named product-owner approval. Machine tests recompute it from the frozen protocol and compare both values with an independent literal in the test source. Mutable result records are excluded, so honest evidence cannot rewrite the approved contract. Changing a threshold, denominator, metric definition, confidence method, provider requirement, calibration method, or the 500-company workload requires a new protocol or cost package and approval. Any such change after scoring also requires a new blind-corpus version and cannot rescue the current score.

approvedAt must be a valid RFC 3339 timestamp. Once any empirical result is complete, firstScoredRunStartedAt must also be valid and strictly later than approval. Missing, invalid, or equal timestamps stop promotion.

Every JSON file in the evaluation-fixture directory must be registered with a deliberate schema validator. Empirical result schemas allow only aggregate counts, opaque IDs, labels over opaque IDs, and SHA-256 digests; raw company or customer identity, prompts, content, domains, handles, and source URLs are forbidden.

Promotion boundary

While the decision is stop, the only permitted implementation is:

  • fixtures; and
  • dark contracts with no paid-provider calls or customer-visible behavior.

The following remain forbidden: paid-provider runtime, event publication, public REST writes, the Company Monitoring workspace, and alerts. Stage 0 may change to continue only after the base-rate and rediscovery aggregate records pass, the two-customer usefulness result passes, provider policy has separately approved runtime evidence, runtime enforces the frozen X and model policies, and the machine test recomputes every gate without a stop reason.