{ "schema": "longtermcapabilities-defined-terms/v1", "version": "1.64.0", "releaseId": "lts-1.64.0-upgrade-safe-rewrites-and-privacy-erasure-integrity", "generated": "2026-08-03T20:40:00Z", "path": "/machine-intelligence/glossary/", "terms": [ { "term": "A2A", "slug": "a2a", "definition": "Agent2Agent Protocol: a protocol for communication and collaboration among agent systems. Interoperability does not itself establish authorization or trust." }, { "term": "Agency", "slug": "agency", "definition": "The practical degree to which a system may choose actions, tools, sequence, timing, or delegation. Agency should be described by actual authority, not by a conversational interface." }, { "term": "Agent", "slug": "agent", "definition": "A software participant that can select among possible next actions from a goal, current state, evidence, policy, and feedback rather than following only one fixed prompt-response step." }, { "term": "Agentic AI", "slug": "agentic-ai", "definition": "An AI-enabled system that observes, plans, uses bounded tools, evaluates results, updates state, and stops or escalates through a multi-step control loop." }, { "term": "Agentic RAG", "slug": "agentic-rag", "definition": "A retrieval system in which an agent adaptively plans, reformulates, chooses sources or tools, iterates, verifies, or delegates retrieval rather than following one fixed retrieval pipeline." }, { "term": "AI system", "slug": "ai-system", "definition": "The complete sociotechnical arrangement of models, data, software, people, policies, interfaces, infrastructure, and operating procedures used to produce an AI-assisted outcome." }, { "term": "Architecture decision record (ADR)", "slug": "architecture-decision-record-adr", "definition": "A durable record of an architectural decision, the alternatives considered, evidence, assumptions, consequences, owner, and conditions that should reopen the decision." }, { "term": "Authorization", "slug": "authorization", "definition": "The decision that a particular identity may perform a specific action on a specific resource under current policy and context." }, { "term": "Autonomy", "slug": "autonomy", "definition": "The extent to which a system can continue without synchronous human instruction. Autonomy is task- and boundary-specific, not a single product-wide label." }, { "term": "Blackboard architecture", "slug": "blackboard-architecture", "definition": "A coordination pattern in which participants read and write to a shared problem state or evidence space rather than communicating only through direct messages." }, { "term": "Capability", "slug": "capability", "definition": "A bounded operation an actor can perform, such as reading a document, proposing a payment, or executing a deployment. Capabilities should be scoped and revocable." }, { "term": "Conditional release", "slug": "conditional-release", "definition": "A release decision that permits use only within explicit limits, with required remediation, monitoring, review dates, or excluded populations and actions." }, { "term": "Context window", "slug": "context-window", "definition": "The model-visible input available during one inference. It is temporary working context, not a durable or authoritative memory system." }, { "term": "Control loop", "slug": "control-loop", "definition": "The sequence by which a system observes, interprets, plans, authorizes, acts, verifies, remembers, and stops or continues." }, { "term": "Coordination cost", "slug": "coordination-cost", "definition": "The added latency, tokens, messages, state, conflict resolution, evaluation, and operational burden created when work is distributed among multiple participants." }, { "term": "Delegation", "slug": "delegation", "definition": "A principal granting an agent or subordinate actor a narrower authority to act for a defined purpose, period, resource set, and consequence limit." }, { "term": "Deterministic workflow", "slug": "deterministic-workflow", "definition": "A process whose steps and transitions are expressed in code, rules, or a state machine rather than chosen probabilistically at runtime." }, { "term": "Effect verification", "slug": "effect-verification", "definition": "Checking the real downstream result of an action instead of treating a successful API response or model statement as proof that the intended business state exists." }, { "term": "Episode", "slug": "episode", "definition": "One bounded execution or case, including its trigger, evidence, decisions, actions, state transitions, reviews, and outcome." }, { "term": "Evaluation dataset", "slug": "evaluation-dataset", "definition": "A versioned collection of representative, edge, adverse, and prohibited cases with expected behavior or adjudication criteria used to test an AI system." }, { "term": "Evaluation harness", "slug": "evaluation-harness", "definition": "The repeatable software and procedure that runs cases, captures traces, scores outcomes and trajectories, and produces reviewable evidence." }, { "term": "Goal hijacking", "slug": "goal-hijacking", "definition": "A failure in which untrusted content, another actor, or a conflicting instruction changes the agent's effective objective away from the authorized goal." }, { "term": "Groundedness", "slug": "groundedness", "definition": "The degree to which an output is supported by the permitted source evidence. Groundedness does not by itself establish completeness or correctness." }, { "term": "Human authority", "slug": "human-authority", "definition": "The named decision rights that remain with accountable people, including approval, override, refusal, appeal, escalation, and acceptance of residual risk." }, { "term": "Human in the loop", "slug": "human-in-the-loop", "definition": "A configuration in which a person participates during execution, such as by supplying judgment, correcting state, or approving a consequential step." }, { "term": "Human on the loop", "slug": "human-on-the-loop", "definition": "A configuration in which a person supervises operations and can intervene, pause, or revoke authority without approving every ordinary step." }, { "term": "Idempotency", "slug": "idempotency", "definition": "The property that repeating an operation with the same idempotency key does not create an additional unintended effect." }, { "term": "Identity", "slug": "identity", "definition": "The verifiable representation of the human, workload, agent, service, or organization responsible for a request or action." }, { "term": "Indirect prompt injection", "slug": "indirect-prompt-injection", "definition": "An instruction embedded in external content that attempts to redirect model or agent behavior when the content is retrieved or processed." }, { "term": "Machine intelligence", "slug": "machine-intelligence", "definition": "An editorial umbrella for systems that sense, interpret, predict, generate, plan, coordinate, or act with machine assistance, including the surrounding authority and evidence architecture." }, { "term": "MCP", "slug": "mcp", "definition": "Model Context Protocol: a protocol for connecting AI applications to context, resources, prompts, and tools. Protocol compatibility does not grant business authority." }, { "term": "Memory", "slug": "memory", "definition": "Durable information made available across steps or runs. Memory requires provenance, scope, retention, supersession, access control, and separation from authoritative policy." }, { "term": "Multi-agent system", "slug": "multi-agent-system", "definition": "A system in which multiple software agents or participants coordinate, specialize, challenge, negotiate, or allocate work to produce a joint result." }, { "term": "Observability", "slug": "observability", "definition": "The ability to understand system behavior from traces, metrics, events, state, and evidence sufficient to investigate outcomes, cost, failures, and side effects." }, { "term": "Orchestration", "slug": "orchestration", "definition": "The mechanism that routes work, sequences steps, manages state, handles retries, invokes tools, and determines completion or escalation." }, { "term": "Policy decision point", "slug": "policy-decision-point", "definition": "The component that evaluates identity, action, resource, context, and rules to decide whether a requested operation is permitted." }, { "term": "Provenance", "slug": "provenance", "definition": "Information about the origin, authority, observation time, transformation, version, and custody of evidence, memory, or an output." }, { "term": "Quorum", "slug": "quorum", "definition": "A threshold of participants or signals required before a distributed system changes state. Quorum is a coordination mechanism, not automatic accountability." }, { "term": "RAG", "slug": "rag", "definition": "Retrieval-augmented generation: a system that retrieves source material and provides it to a generative model to support an answer or artifact." }, { "term": "Release gate", "slug": "release-gate", "definition": "A documented decision point that compares evidence against explicit criteria and records release, conditional release, hold, or stop." }, { "term": "Residual risk", "slug": "residual-risk", "definition": "Known risk that remains after controls and is explicitly accepted, transferred, avoided, or scheduled for remediation by an authorized owner." }, { "term": "Rollback", "slug": "rollback", "definition": "A tested path for returning code, configuration, model, prompt, data, or authority to a known acceptable state after an unsafe change." }, { "term": "State", "slug": "state", "definition": "The authoritative representation of workflow progress and business facts needed to resume, reconcile, or review an execution." }, { "term": "Stigmergy", "slug": "stigmergy", "definition": "Indirect coordination through changes to a shared environment, where one participant's trace or artifact influences later participants without direct messaging." }, { "term": "Supervisor agent", "slug": "supervisor-agent", "definition": "A coordinating agent that assigns, routes, or reviews work performed by other agents. A supervisor remains another probabilistic component and should not be treated as policy authority." }, { "term": "Swarm intelligence", "slug": "swarm-intelligence", "definition": "Decentralized coordination in which many relatively simple participants follow local rules and feedback, producing system-level behavior without one central planner." }, { "term": "Tool", "slug": "tool", "definition": "A bounded external capability exposed to a model or agent, such as search, database access, messaging, code execution, or transaction proposal." }, { "term": "Trace", "slug": "trace", "definition": "A correlated technical record of the operations and relationships in an execution, ideally connected to the business case and human decision record." }, { "term": "Trajectory", "slug": "trajectory", "definition": "The ordered path of observations, plans, messages, tool calls, state transitions, reviews, and stop conditions taken during one execution." }, { "term": "Unknown state", "slug": "unknown-state", "definition": "A condition in which the system cannot determine whether an attempted external effect succeeded, failed, or partially completed and must reconcile before retrying." } ], "boundary": "Editorial definitions; consult normative sources and use-case-specific requirements." }