// The 48-hour shadow ladder

No capability ships without 48 clean hours.

Every agent climbs L0 → L1 → L2 → L3 through a mechanical shadow window. Any miss — any red-line touch, any unbudgeted spend, any failed eval — resets the clock. This is not a process. It is a contract between you, your compliance team, and the system.

// Tour the tiers

Click any tier to see the gates.

Each tier has six gates that must pass before promotion. Click L0/L1/L2/L3 on the left and the gate panel on the right swaps. Promotion criteria are mechanical, not vibes.

Tier L0 · read-only

✓ Reads connector data: yes

✓ Writes to any system: never

✓ Audit row per read: required

✓ Daily budget cap: enforced

✓ Red-line check: every call

✓ 48h clean shadow before L1 promotion

Promotion criteria: zero red-line touches, eval pass-rate above threshold, operator approval, downstream-system health, behavioral consistency, cost discipline.

The clock is mechanical.Every promotion requires 48 wall-clock-hours of clean shadow firing. The promotion script reads the audit log and refuses if any window is short. No "approximately."

Six gates per tier bump.Behavioral consistency · cost discipline · zero red-line touches · eval pass-rate above threshold · operator approval · downstream-system health. All six green before the agent climbs.

Any miss resets the clock.One unbudgeted spend, one red-line touch, one classifier miss in the eval window, and the agent goes back to the bottom of its current tier. No grandfathering. No exceptions.

Red lines never move.Payments, hard-deletes, unapproved web submits, security-permission changes — Guardian's capabilities_forbidden_always list is immutable across all tiers. Read the red lines →

Field note (June 2026): Anthropic publicly urged a coordinated pause option as frontier AI nears recursive self-improvement, naming loss of human oversight as the danger line. That is why this ladder exists: autonomy is earned through mechanical shadow windows and gates, never assumed — and no agent self-modifies, ever. (Anthropic, 2026-06-04; reported by Al Jazeera and others.)

The ladder runs in production now.

Of 35 agents: 30 in shadow (L0), 3 proposing (L1), 2 acting-with-review (L2), and 0 at full autonomy (L3) — nothing in the company acts without a human above it in the loop. Two L0→L1 promotions landed this week, both with clean shadow logs you can read.

See the ladder live →The Five Rails