# Literature assessment correction — 2026-10-10

**Disposition:** Reopen the literature and novelty assessment. The historical “GATE CLOSED” conclusion does not support submission readiness.

The September 2 notes remain in the repository as a dated record. Their interpretation of Positive Alignment is too narrow: version 1, §5.3, explicitly considers local-norm middleware, institutional auditing, dispute resolution, and continuing governance. The source therefore contradicts a blanket characterization as training/model-specification only. This does not establish that its authors implemented a particular runtime gate; it establishes that the proposed intellectual distinction was overstated.

| Source checked | Primary location | Scope of this check |
|---|---|---|
| Laukkonen et al., *Positive Alignment* (2026), v1 | [Versioned text, §5.3](https://arxiv.org/html/2605.10310v1) | Institutional and operational scope; not an audit of all implementations |
| VanderWeele, *On the promotion of human flourishing* (2017) | [Full article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5547610/) | Flourishing as broader than a single outcome proxy |
| Boella, van der Torre, Verhagen, Dagstuhl 07122 (2007) | [Institutional seminar record](https://www.dagstuhl.de/07122) | Normative multi-agent systems as prior research context |
| Schneider, *Enforceable Security Policies* (2000) | [Author-hosted paper](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/fbs/publications/EnfSecPols.pdf) | Mechanism-specific enforcement limits |

The subsequent [source audit](source-audit-2026-10-10.md) resolves the inventory's 35 actual entries and identifies 13 concrete citation/version mismatches. Its ledger distinguishes six bounded text checks from 16 metadata-only dispositions; these are coverage categories, not validity ratings. The historical BibTeX and report bodies remain preserved so the corrections can be traced.

The audit also changes the comparison with neighboring work. EAF's pinned public material already connects ethical commitments to inspectable constraints, while explicitly disclaiming deployment evidence. Ruan's RoF and FVT abstracts include assurance, monitoring or governance. FAR was only partially resolved. The living manuscript now acknowledges these overlaps and does not substitute unverified HUMMBL deployment assertions for an evidence-matched comparison. Primary links and version-specific boundaries are in the source audit.

No systematic-search completeness claim is made. Counts such as “18+ papers,” absence claims, and first-deployment assertions must not be reused as audited results. A defensible future review needs dated queries, databases, inclusion criteria, versioned sources, extraction records, and explicit treatment of inaccessible work.

The new manuscript narrows the contribution to a translation record and prospective evaluation. It supplies no production evidence for claims of a first deployment or flourishing-preserving invariants. Lack of deposited evidence is not evidence that the deployment does not exist; it is a limit on what this paper can substantiate.