The Cognitive Continuity Test: Verifying Governed State Transitions in Persistent AI Agents

The Cognitive Continuity Test (CCT) is a policy-relative verification contract designed to audit explicit state transitions in persistent AI agents by validating scoped authority, provenance, and semantic predicates rather than relying solely on state observation.

• Verification Mechanism: CCT utilizes a ternary output system returning valid, invalid, or indeterminate, distinguishing between verified admissibility and unresolved evidence to prevent unsupported transitions.
• Key Innovation: It addresses the limitation that identical successor states can result from both authorized and unauthorized claims, using IdentityLineageBench to verify that transition claims carry authentic credentials from permitted principals.
• Operational Scope: The test separates runtime identity from record verification, ensuring that while a state may be policy-compliant, it does not inherently guarantee the agent is a live, unimpeded runtime or that the transition wasn't a replay attack.

The framework complements infrastructural solutions like the Continuity Kernel (CK), which handles the atomic activation of state, by providing the specific policy-level audit for the legitimacy of the transition record itself.

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