● State OS · Concept paper
State OS: Concept and Architecture
A shadow-mode record of government decisions: what was decided, what was knowable, what was expected, and who changed the machine’s draft
- Author
- Andrey Tikhonov
- Genre
- Concept paper
- Status
- Working text, not peer reviewed. Describes a design and a research prototype that has not been released.
- Version
- 1.1-web
- Published
- Updated
Summary
State OS is a proposed public record-keeping system that runs in shadow mode beside one real government and has no governmental authority. For each covered cabinet decision it would publish one Decision Record that binds the official text to a frozen evidence snapshot, constitutional flags, authored alternatives, mandatory dissent, pre-registered forecasts and a named human editor’s review. This paper sets out the problem, the components, the limits the project accepts, and how the first version could be shown to have failed. As of October 2026 the system exists as a research prototype that runs locally. No Decision Record has been published, and there is no software release, pilot or deployment.
How to read this paper
State OS is a research project. This paper describes a design and the first prototype of it. To keep the two apart, statements are worded in one of four ways:
- Fact: an external claim with a numbered source. Each source was opened on 4 October 2026, and each quotation and figure was compared with the source again on 5 October. The source list says where only an abstract or an official summary could be read.
- Official statement or press report: what an institution or a newspaper says, attributed as such.
- Our proposal: a design choice. It can be argued with, but it is not a claim about the world.
- Hypothesis: something the project is built to test and has not yet shown.
Four words describe the stage of any part of the project: concept (written down), prototype (code that runs locally), pilot (operation with real editors and outside verifiers), and live deployment (public operation). Section 12 says where each part stands. In short: the concept and specification are written, a research prototype exists and runs locally, and there is no public software release, no pilot and no live deployment.
1. The problem
Governments analyse their decisions, and a good deal of that analysis is public. What is published arrives in pieces, from different bodies, at different times and in different formats.
The Netherlands is a clear example. The Council of Ministers publishes a decision list after its meetings, described on the government site as an overview of all decisions taken, with a brief explanation of each [1]. A Dutch parliamentary news service reported in April 2021 that the Council had agreed to make its agenda and decision list public [3]. Statistics, consolidated legislation and parliamentary records are each available from their own machine-readable services [47][48][49]. The CPB, the Dutch economic policy analysis bureau, publishes macroeconomic projections [5]. Elsewhere, New Zealand's official guidance says that Cabinet papers are to be published no later than 30 business days after final Cabinet decisions, unless there is good reason not to [4].
What the public record does not usually keep is one structured, time-stamped object that links, for a single decision:
evidence → assumptions → alternatives considered → forecasts → decision → outcome.
For a given decision, a later reader typically cannot recover:
- the evidence as it stood at the time, since official statistics are revised and a later reader sees later versions;
- which alternatives were considered, and under which values each would have been preferred;
- what was expected to happen, in a form that can be scored afterwards;
- whether the analysis came from people, from models, or from both;
- what happened next, measured against what was expected.
The fourth gap is growing. The Associated Press reported in 2023 that a city ordinance in Porto Alegre, Brazil, had been drafted with ChatGPT and passed by the council without that being disclosed [8]. In September 2026 Gulf News reported that the UAE Cabinet had approved a system of 32 specialised AI assistants to analyse policies and legislation and to provide recommendations to ministers [9]. The report says nothing about whether their outputs will be published.
The problem is narrow. It is not that governments lack analysis, and it is not that decisions are secret. Some confidentiality is lawful and deliberate. The problem is that the links between the pieces are not recorded as one checkable object, and nobody binds expectations to a decision before the outcome is known. Without that, "we would have done better" can always be argued after the fact. Registering a plan before the results are in is the standard defence against hindsight [44].
2. The proposal
State OS is our proposal for a public shadow infrastructure. It has no governmental authority and claims none. It would run beside the observable decisions of one real government and keep a persistent, checkable record of each covered decision.
The research question is:
Can a public shadow infrastructure, with no governmental authority, produce a persistent, verifiable and comparable record of a real government's decisions, one that is complete under a fixed coverage rule, verifiable by outsiders, honestly scored where scoring is possible, and not mistaken for authority?
The name is a project name and is used the same way throughout. It does not describe an operating system for a state, and the project does not claim that a state can or should be run by software.
3. What State OS is not
The project began from a broader idea and was narrowed by a review of the evidence. Each exclusion below binds the design.
Not a digital twin of a country. No integrated, validated socio-economic model of a state was found. A study of CovidSim, an epidemiological model on which the UK government relied in part in early 2020, found that of 940 input parameters, the output was most sensitive to a subset of 19, that uncertainty in those inputs was magnified by up to 300%, and that the model showed substantial bias against observed data [10]. The component is therefore called a data platform with scenario models (section 6).
Not an executable constitution. Germany's debt brake is among the most arithmetic of constitutional rules. In 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court declared a supplementary budget act void, on grounds that included a missing factual connection between the declared emergency and the measures taken, and a breach of the principle of annual budgeting [11]. No arithmetic check would have caught either. The Dutch parliamentary inquiry into the childcare-benefits affair found legislation that was "spijkerhard" (rigid) and lacked a hardship clause [12]. A faithful encoding of that law would have reproduced the rigidity. State OS therefore never outputs "constitutional" or "unconstitutional".
Not a synthetic stand-in for citizens or parties. Studies of language models asked to answer as demographic groups report less variation than real surveys and results that shift with prompt wording and over a three-month period [13], substantial misalignment with the views of US demographic groups [14], and a tendency to "misportray and flatten" identity groups [15]. The alternatives in a State OS record are therefore authored position models. They are not the voice of any party or constituency.
No automatic legitimacy. A cross-national experiment found that transparency had "a subdued and sometimes negative effect on trust in government" [16]. Another study called the idea of a straightforward positive link between transparency and legitimacy "naïve" [17]. State OS keeps transparency as an accountability duty. It does not treat transparency as a source of trust.
No clean line between human and machine. The Court of Justice of the EU held that producing an automated probability score is itself automated decision-making where a third party "draws strongly" on it [18]. In the UK Post Office litigation, the High Court found the original Horizon system "not remotely robust" [19]; the people who relied on its output were formally the decision-makers throughout. Human authority is never cleanly separate from machine analysis. State OS proposes to measure the human contribution instead of asserting it (section 9).
No claims about what would have happened. The effect of a policy that was not enacted is never observed: both potential outcomes cannot be seen on the same unit [20]. State OS never states that an alternative "would have worked" or "would have been better".
Other exclusions. State OS is not a government-in-waiting, a virtual president, a voting aid or a campaign tool, and it does not output a single recommended option. It produces no outputs about individuals. Our proposal is that it takes no government or party money. These limits are also legal ones: the EU AI Act lists as high-risk any AI system intended to influence the outcome of an election or the voting behaviour of natural persons [21]. The paper makes no claim about the legality or wisdom of running such a system inside a government.
4. The Decision Record
The atomic object is the Decision Record: an append-only, time-stamped document about exactly one official decision. It records what was decided; on what evidence, as it stood then; under which encoded legal constraints; which authored alternatives were constructed on the same evidence; the strongest case against each option; what is forecast on the path actually taken; who reviewed the record and what they changed; and, later, how the forecasts resolved.
The form borrows from software practice. In Architecture Decision Records, a reversed decision is kept and marked as superseded, not deleted [22]. Every individual field in a Decision Record has a precedent somewhere. What we have not found is a precedent that binds all of them into one object per decision.
4.1 Seven labels
Every statement in a record carries exactly one label. The labels decide what can be checked and how.
| Label | Meaning | Can it be scored? |
|---|---|---|
| FACT | Observed and sourced: official text, a statistic at a declared version, a date | Checked against the source |
| FORECAST | A probability about an observable event on the enacted path, with a resolution rule | Yes, with proper scoring rules |
| SIMULATION | Model output under stated assumptions | Only by checking the code and validating on the enacted path |
| COUNTERFACTUAL | A model-dependent estimate for an option that was not enacted | No. Labelled "not scorable" |
| NORMATIVE | A judgment made under a declared value framework | No. Checked only for consistency with the declared values |
| LEGAL-FLAG | Output of the Constitutional Clerk (section 7) | Agreement with lawyers only |
| RECORD | Provenance metadata: hashes, times, signatures, review decisions | Integrity only |
4.2 Main fields
| Field | Content |
|---|---|
reality | The official decision, verbatim in Dutch, with source, hash and date, plus a logged translation. The Dutch original stays authoritative |
problem | The framing of the issue (labelled as framing) and its factual premises, each with a source |
data_snapshot | A manifest of the data available at the time, hashed and fixed before any analysis is generated |
constraints | Legal flags from the Clerk; the budget envelope where one is known |
options | The status quo, the enacted decision, and alternatives written under each value framework |
effects | Forecasts for the enacted path; labelled, unscorable estimates for alternatives |
dissent | The strongest case against every option, including the enacted one |
divergence | For each pair of alternatives, whether they differ because of values, model, forecast or facts |
human_review | The named editor's accept, modify or reject decision per section, with reasons, and hashes of the machine draft and the published text |
known_defects | Open errors and data problems |
signatures | Commit signature and external time-stamp proofs |
retrospective | Resolved forecasts, scores and corrections, appended as new entries |
labels | Fixed disclaimers, including "State OS has no governmental authority" and an AI-generation disclosure |
Three rules follow from this layout. The real decision appears first, in the government's own words. Every alternative carries its framework version and a fixed disclaimer. Only enacted-path questions have resolution rules, because only they can be scored.
5. Architecture
- Portfolio agents (6)
- Alternatives under Authored Value Frameworks 1–4
- Dissent (separate model lineage)
- Constitutional Clerk (three permitted outputs)
- Forecasting (enacted path only)
- Coordinator (assembles; cannot silently edit)
- Audit
5.1 State Git: the provenance layer
State Git is our name for a Git-based record that is signed, mirrored and externally witnessed. It holds mirrored official sources, Decision Records, snapshot manifests, model and prompt manifests, dissent and retrospectives. It is a ledger of what was recorded and when. It is not a mechanism by which law changes. Consolidated EU legal texts carry a standard notice that they are "purely … a documentation tool" with "no legal effect" [23], and State Git makes the same disclaimer about itself: in State OS, a merge means "recorded", never "adopted".
Three design points matter.
Two time axes. Every mirrored text and data point carries a valid time (when a rule applied, or which period a statistic describes) and a record time (when State OS retrieved it). A record must be judged against what was knowable on the decision date.
Detection, not prevention. The Certificate Transparency standard states that its logs "do not themselves prevent misissuance" but let interested parties detect it [24]. On GitHub, branch protection rules do not by default apply to repository administrators [25]. State OS therefore never says "history cannot be rewritten". It says that rewrites are detectable by outside witnesses, which holds only if someone is actually watching. Integrity is also not correctness: a perfectly logged record can still be wrong.
Honest reproducibility. One published test ran the same prompt 1,000 times at temperature zero and obtained 80 distinct outputs; with batch-invariant inference all 1,000 were identical [26]. A separate study found accuracy varying by up to 15% between runs under nominally deterministic settings [27]. Providers also retire models, after which requests to them fail [28]. So the design promises three levels: artefact integrity for all records; statistical re-execution where a model is still served or open-weights; bitwise re-execution only on a pinned open-weights path.
The integrity tools are existing ones, used as they are: Git commit signing with Sigstore and its Rekor transparency log [29], OpenTimestamps [30] and RFC 3161 time-stamping [31]. A signature shows who recorded something and when. It does not show that the content is true or lawful.
5.2 State Data Platform and scenario models
The State Data Platform is the ingestion layer for official data. Every item carries its source, version, retrieval time, hash and licence. Our proposal is that it holds no personal data beyond the names of public officials acting in office, and builds no composite "state health" index.
Scenario models produce the SIMULATION and COUNTERFACTUAL content. The rule is reuse before build. Open tax-benefit microsimulation already exists, including PolicyEngine [32], OpenFisca [33] and EUROMOD [34]. Whether any of them offers a usable Dutch model is an open dependency and is not assumed. Where no established model exists, the fallback is a simple documented model with stated assumptions and ranges, or a qualitative estimate. Whether integrated state-level modelling adds anything beyond sectoral models is a hypothesis the first version does not assume.
5.3 The Shadow Analysis Cabinet
The analysis is divided among six portfolio agents (fiscal and economy; labour and social affairs; health and care; housing, infrastructure and climate; education; justice and interior) and five function agents:
| Agent | Function | Hard limit |
|---|---|---|
| Coordinator | Assembles the record | Cannot silently edit other agents' outputs; raw outputs are kept |
| Forecasting | Writes probability forecasts for the enacted path | Numbers only; a resolution rule is required |
| Dissent | Makes the strongest case against every option | Runs on a different model lineage from the proposers |
| Constitutional Clerk | Runs encoded rules; routes interpretive clauses to people | Three outputs only |
| Audit | Checks provenance, completeness and drift | Can rule against the system |
Scoring is not done by an agent. It is a separate, open, deterministic procedure run by a person who does not configure the forecasting.
These agents are not ministers and the set is not a cabinet in any constitutional sense. They hold no authority, nobody delegated anything to them, and their outputs are inputs to a human-edited record. The design uses no ministry titles, state insignia or ministerial personas.
Two things about such agents are unresolved, and the project claims neither: whether portfolio agents produce alternatives that experts find useful, and whether machine-written dissent makes analysis more robust. The best-documented public-sector evaluation we found, of the UK government's Consult tool, reports that its themes matched human reviewers' exactly for 60% of responses, against 62% agreement between two human reviewers in the team's earlier internal testing, and that reviewers added themes 1,671 times and removed them 763 times [35]. That shows logging of human intervention is practical. It does not show that the approach transfers to policy alternatives.
Agents that read outside documents are exposed to prompt injection. OWASP states that it is unclear whether fool-proof prevention exists [36], and one published attack reached a 90% success rate with five malicious texts per target question [37]. In the design, agents that read untrusted text have no tools and no write access, and retrieved passages are quoted verbatim.
6. Authored Value Frameworks
The alternatives are the most distinctive output of State OS and the one with no source of legitimacy. This is the project's largest unsolved problem, and the paper states it plainly:
- They cannot be validated by outcomes, because the counterfactual is never observed [20].
- Nobody authorised them. The OECD's principles for independent fiscal institutions say such bodies "should be precluded from any normative policy-making responsibilities to avoid even the perception of partisanship" [7].
- They borrow no consent. The CPB's comparison of Dutch election manifestos rests on parties choosing to take part: the CPB states that participation is voluntary and that the publication "is not a voting guide" [5]. A framework written for a political tradition by an outside team has no such consent.
The design response is to make authorship explicit. Each alternative is written under one of four Authored Value Frameworks: social-democratic, liberal, conservative, and technocratic (cost-effectiveness). They are analytical models. They are not named after, attributed to or endorsed by any real party.
Each framework is a versioned document with named authors and declared interests, weights over a fixed list of value dimensions, ordered priority rules, red lines, scope notes, and a review by at least two external people who identify with that tradition. All frameworks work on the same snapshot, the same models and the same budget constraint. When two alternatives differ, the record must say whether the difference comes from values, model, forecast or facts. An unexplained difference is a defect.
Even with outside reviewers, "the conservative framework" is always someone's conservatism. Until independent bodies author or own the frameworks, the alternatives remain the founders' analysis, transparently recorded, and the design requires the site to say so.
7. The Constitutional Clerk
The constitutional layer is not a "superprompt". As designed it has four parts: a knowledge base of provisions in their official text; a test suite of regression cases; a narrow formal layer limited to procedure, deadlines, eligibility, numeric fiscal rules and competence; and human-review triggers for every interpretive clause.
The Clerk emits exactly one of three outputs per rule:
| Output | Meaning | Must never be read as |
|---|---|---|
NO_FLAG_ON_ENCODED_RULES | No encoded rule was violated | "Constitutional" |
FLAG | An encoded rule appears violated, with provision and reason | "Unconstitutional" |
HUMAN_REVIEW_REQUIRED | An interpretive clause is engaged | A pending verdict |
The main risk is false reassurance. The design answers it with mandatory historic test cases. One is the German budget ruling above [11]. Another is the Dutch SyRI case, in which the District Court of The Hague declared risk-profiling legislation to have no binding effect as contrary to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights [38]; the correct Clerk output for such a case is HUMAN_REVIEW_REQUIRED. The design also requires publishing the rate of false reassurance on historic cases and measuring agreement with a blinded panel of lawyers. Neither measurement has been made.
8. The forecast ledger and the counterfactual boundary
Of everything State OS would produce, only forecasts of observable events on the enacted path can count as evidence of skill. A scoring rule is "proper" if the forecaster maximises the expected score by reporting their true belief [39]. Our proposal is that every forecast is fixed before its outcome with an exact resolution rule, time-stamped, and later scored beside a naive baseline and, where one exists for the same variable and horizon, an official forecast. The published object is a table of all forecasters on identical questions. There is no leaderboard.
Three limits are built in.
A null result is the likely outcome. By our own estimate, detecting a realistic difference in skill needs from about 150 to several thousand independent forecasts, and a first year would produce on the order of 60 to 150 correlated ones. Twelve months could show calibration, bias and integrity. It could not show superiority over official forecasters. The project commits to publishing a null result.
Historical replays are not evidence. Language models memorise economic data from before their training cutoff, and neither instructions nor masking prevent recall; in the authors' words, forecasting ability "is non-identified when the model has seen the realized values" [40]. Any replay of past decisions is a pipeline test and is labelled as contaminated.
Forecasts can move outcomes. Predictions that support decisions may influence what they predict [45]. The design publishes forecasts only after the official decision, keeps the question list fixed, and publishes no aggregate credibility score.
The counterfactual boundary is the firmest rule in the project. The following are forbidden as outputs, metrics or dashboard elements: any "win rate against the government"; any share of cases where an alternative "would have been better"; simulated outcomes of alternatives presented as results; any single recommended option.
9. The human editor
The editor is a component of the system. There are two reasons.
The first is legal. Under Article 50(4) of the EU AI Act, AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest must be disclosed as such, unless it has undergone human review or editorial control and a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for publication [21]. Our proposal is to do both: disclose and name an editor.
The second is that "a human in the loop" proves little. One set of experiments found that AI explanations increased the chance that people accepted an AI recommendation "regardless of its correctness" [41]. A review concluded that automation bias "cannot be prevented by training or instructions" [42]. Three experimental studies in the Netherlands tested both automation bias and selective adoption of algorithmic advice that matches stereotypes [43]. They found no automation bias. They found selective adoption in one study and not in a later one with civil servants, and where they found it, it was no stronger for algorithmic advice than for a human expert's. The evidence is mixed. Rubber-stamping and selective acceptance are both risks to measure; neither is an established effect.
So the design measures the loop. For every section of every record the editor chooses accept, modify or reject and gives a reason. The hashes of the machine draft and the published text are both stored. Known, harmless errors are seeded into drafts at a pre-registered rate and the catch rate is published. A sample goes to blind second review.
10. Who controls State OS
In a first version, the founding team does. It writes the constitutional tests, the frameworks, the coverage rule and the interface, and holds the keys. No design for a team of a few people removes this. The aim is to make that control visible, logged, constrained, contestable and forkable.
The proposed controls include: protected branches with no bypass; two reviewers on protected paths; outside mirrors and external time-stamps; a published, mechanical coverage rule with a ledger of skipped items; a scorer separate from the forecaster; separate model lineages for proposers, dissent and the Clerk; a pause-only kill switch with no delete path; no personal data; and a public role registry.
What these controls do not buy should be said as clearly. With a small team, "two approvals" means two of the same people. A patient insider is not reliably detectable. And nothing technical prevents a government or a party from citing a record to lend neutral-looking support to a decision it had already taken.
The honest claim for a first version is that the founders' control would be visible and forkable. It would not be plural. Plural control (keys held across independent institutions, an external scorer, frameworks owned by independent bodies) is written down as a later stage so that failure to reach it is visible.
11. Why the Netherlands, and what we found
The choice of reference country is technical only. It is not a judgment about Dutch politics or government. The Netherlands was chosen because every data layer a Decision Record needs could be retrieved from primary sources. The weekly decision list is the decisive asset, since it maps directly onto the reality field.
In late September 2026 the project re-tested access and measured real volume. These are the project's own results. They have not been independently replicated, and the volume coding was done by machine without human double-coding.
- Access. Every intended source answered in machine-readable form. No bot protection was met and none was bypassed.
- A correction. The decision list is served as a PDF through the government's open publication platform [2], not as a web page as the specification had assumed. That platform's robots file disallows general crawlers and no terms for automated use of its interface were found. Our position is that scheduled automated retrieval needs written confirmation from the publisher first. That confirmation has not been obtained.
- Volume. 48 decision lists from 29 August 2025 to 18 September 2026 contained 2,030 items, with a median of about 40 per list. Under the project's coverage rule, roughly 900 a year are in scope, a median of about 18 per working week. That is about double the planning assumption, so a capacity limit with pre-registered random sampling would apply in most weeks.
- What cannot be known at decision time. In a four-item test, the budget envelope was unknowable a week after each decision, and bill texts were not yet public. A record made at that point can document only the Council's stated intent and needs a mandatory later revision.
- Statistics versions. The statistics service returns current versions only [47]. Evidence "as it stood then" can be guaranteed only from data the project has itself stored going forward.
- Forecast questions. No sub-annual budget-execution series was found, so that question class must be dropped or redefined. The official projections are annual, so there is no official baseline for monthly questions.
- Elections. The Dutch Electoral Council gives 17 March 2027 for the provincial elections and 24 May 2027 for the Senate election [46]. Our recommendation is not to begin public operation before the latter date.
Known limits of the choice: only the Dutch text is authoritative, so translation is a logged step and a tracked source of error; the decision lists go back only to 2021; and the Netherlands has no national policy rate.
12. What exists today
| Part | Stage on 4 October 2026 |
|---|---|
| Concept, white paper, specification | Complete as drafts. Not peer reviewed |
| Evidence review behind the design | Complete as an internal ledger. AI-assisted; not independently audited |
| Source ingestion for the Netherlands | Prototype. Runs locally on real sources |
| Decision Record engine, schema and validator | Prototype. The schema was revised after the first tests |
| Alternatives, dissent, Clerk, forecast registration | Prototype. Run on real decisions |
| Human editorial review | Not started. No editor holds the role |
| Value frameworks | Four drafts with no named authors and no external reviewers |
| External witnessing, signing, mirrors | Code written. Nothing submitted to any public log |
| Scoring | Not started. No forecast has resolved |
| Legal review | A brief for Dutch counsel is written. No counsel engaged |
| Public site and API | Not built from a reviewed run |
| Pilot | None |
| Live deployment | None |
The prototype run. On 2 October 2026 the pipeline ran end to end on eight real decisions taken from the Council of Ministers lists of 28 August, 4 September and 11 September 2026. According to the run output, it produced eight draft Decision Records, each of which passed the project's own automated schema and consistency checks. Each draft contains six options, dissent against all six, Clerk outputs and registered forecast questions.
The eight records are draft outputs of that one run. A record that passes the checks has the required fields, cites only sources in its snapshot and is internally consistent. Passing says nothing about whether its legal flags are correct, whether the analysis is sound, or whether a record of this kind would work in use. The specific limits are these:
- No draft has been read by a human editor. All eight are held at the review gate. The translations have not been checked by a person.
- No record can be published as it stands. Three independent conditions block it and are enforced in the code: there is no named editor; every value framework is a draft with no reviewers; and nothing has been externally time-stamped.
- All eight are marked unstable. Repeated generation on identical inputs gave different outputs each time. The stability rule did its job by flagging this.
- Input data. The models received published documents only: the decision texts from the Council's lists [2], the constitutional text from the official repository [49], and aggregate statistics from the CBS open-data service [47]. No personal data were used beyond the names of ministers as they appear in those documents. The eight decisions are real; none is synthetic. The Clerk calls no model. Its regression suite holds five short test descriptions written by the project, three modelled on historic cases and two synthetic controls.
- Model providers. The specified configuration did not run. A first attempt on OpenAI models stopped during the third record when the account's credit ran out; its two completed drafts are kept separately and are not among the eight. The completed run used the two providers that were available that day on the project's existing access: a Yandex model for the portfolio, alternatives and forecast roles, and Google Gemini models for dissent. Two lineages therefore ran, but the run does not show that using several model lineages improves anything.
- Open questions about those providers. The Gemini endpoint was a free-tier service, and the project's own assessment is that its data terms do not suit unpublished drafts. According to the project's access notes, the Yandex service processes requests outside the EU. The data sent were public, so the project rates the data risk as low. The governance question is separate and is undecided: whether a transparency record about Dutch government decisions should depend on a provider based in Russia at all. A pilot would need a decision on that, and a configuration that a named editor and outside reviewers accept.
- The forecasts are not yet evidence of anything. They were registered in a local hash chain only. Without an external time-stamp, a local chain cannot show that it was not built afterwards.
- Residual leakage. The decision texts and the constitutional text were fixed as of each decision date. Statistics were filtered to that date but served at today's version, so later revisions of earlier periods may be present. Each draft records this.
- The budget envelope was unknown for seven of the eight.
The run shows that the record format can be produced mechanically from real Dutch decisions, and that the publication gates hold. It does not show that the records are accurate, legally correct, useful or fair, and it is not evidence that the design works in practice.
13. How the first version would be judged
Seven objectives are fixed in advance. The thresholds are proposals; several await measurement before they are registered.
| # | Objective | Proposed success test | Failure condition |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | A complete record for every in-scope decision, on time | At least 90% coverage within 7 days; every skip logged | Coverage under 70%, or an unlogged skip found by an outsider |
| P2 | Outsiders can verify provenance and detect rewrites | All sampled signatures verified; at least 95% of sampled records rebuilt from pinned inputs | An unlogged rewrite, or under 80% rebuilt |
| P3 | Forecasts calibrated and honestly scored | Every registered item scored; 80% intervals cover 70–90% | Coverage under 65%, or any registered item missing from the scores |
| P4 | Frameworks differ for declared reasons and are recognised | Differences attributed in at least 95% of records; reviewers rate fidelity at or above the scale midpoint | Reviewers reject the framework, or differences are unexplained |
| P5 | The Clerk flags without falsely reassuring | Zero "no flag" outputs on historic cases voided on encoded grounds | Material false reassurance |
| P6 | Editors exercise judgment | Non-zero modify and reject rates with reasons; seeded-error catch rate of at least 70% | Near-total unmodified acceptance and most seeded errors missed |
| P7 | Readers do not mistake State OS for authority | At least 80% of tested readers correctly identify "not government", "not a party", "alternatives not scored" | A majority over-attribute authority |
At a twelve-month evaluation the project would publish the conclusion that State OS does not work if coverage fails, if integrity fails, if honest scoring fails, if human judgment turns out not to be real, if readers take it for authority, or if the record can only be sustained by effort beyond pre-registered time and cost limits. If the frameworks fail (P4), the alternatives layer is withdrawn and the system continues as a provenance and forecast record. If the Clerk fails (P5), it is withdrawn until redesigned.
Three things are declared in advance not to count as failure, because the project never claimed them: no forecasting advantage over official or naive baselines; no evidence that trust increased; no uptake by government. One result counts as inconclusive: if no outside party verifies any record during the year, the claim that rewrites are detectable was untested, not passed.
14. Prior work and what is new
State OS invents none of its components. Credit belongs to the institutions and projects that built them.
| Component | Existing practice | What State OS takes |
|---|---|---|
| Comparing programmes on a common model | CPB's Charted Choices: voluntary, ten parties in the 2025 edition, "not a voting guide" [5]; the 2023 edition was the eleventh [6] | The core idea of the alternatives layer. The CPB's legitimacy comes from parties submitting their own programmes |
| Open policy simulation | PolicyEngine, OpenFisca, EUROMOD [32][33][34] | Reuse, not reinvention |
| Law registers | Consolidated texts published as non-authoritative documentation [23] | Byte-exact mirroring and the non-authoritative banner |
| Decision logs | Architecture Decision Records [22]; New Zealand's proactive release of Cabinet papers [4] | "Superseded, not deleted"; human gates |
| Integrity tooling | Sigstore and Rekor, RFC 3161, OpenTimestamps, Certificate Transparency [24][29][30][31] | Used as they are. No custom cryptography |
| Scoring practice | Proper scoring rules [39]; pre-registration [44] | The evaluation design |
| AI inside government | Press-reported cabinet assistants in the UAE [9]; the UK's Consult evaluation [35] | Evidence that capability is not the barrier. Publicity, scoring and dissent are what is missing |
Not new: analytical agents organised by portfolio; open policy engines; law text under version control; signed records; a human authority layer; evaluating forecasts against outcomes; comparing programmes on a common model.
The candidate contribution is integrative and procedural: one publicly witnessed, pre-registered record per real decision, binding evidence, models, authored alternatives, dissent, enacted-path forecasts, human review and two-axis provenance, kept in shadow mode beside a real government. We found no precedent that combines all of these. That is a statement about what our review found, not a claim of priority.
Two cautions go with it. The most distinctive element, the alternatives, is the one that cannot be scored. And novelty justifies a research prototype. It does not justify talk of a new form of government.
15. Conclusions and practical implications
- The useful unit is the decision. Most of what is needed to audit a decision is already published somewhere. What is missing is the binding. A per-decision record is a smaller and more testable goal than a model of a state.
- Pre-registration is the part that cannot be added later. Evidence snapshots and forecasts have value only if they are fixed, and witnessed, before the outcome. A system that starts recording afterwards is commentary.
- Alternatives need authors. Machine-written options "for" a political tradition have no consent behind them. Any project that publishes such alternatives should name who wrote the framework, who reviewed it, and who can correct it.
- Flag and cite; never rule. A constitutional check that can say only "no flag on the rules we encoded" is honest about its reach. One that says "constitutional" is not.
- Measure the editor. A named human signature is a legal requirement in some settings. Whether that human exercised judgment is an empirical question, and it can be instrumented.
- People are the binding constraint, not code. The prototype was built in days. The editor, the framework authors and reviewers, the independent scorer, outside mirror operators and legal counsel are what a real pilot waits on.
- For public bodies considering AI-assisted analysis, the transferable parts are the record format, the labelling of what can and cannot be scored, and the logging of human changes. None of these needs a shadow system to adopt.
16. Limitations and open questions
Limitations of this paper. It was drafted with AI assistance and has not been peer reviewed. The evidence review behind it was also AI-assisted and has not been audited by anyone independent of the project. The external facts cited here were re-opened on 4 October 2026. On 5 October each quotation and figure was compared with its source again, this time against the full text wherever an open copy exists. Three wordings were corrected as a result (sources 10, 35 and 43). Two works could be read only as abstracts (17 and 42), one only as an official summary (35), and some facts rest on press releases or press reports; these are worded accordingly. The prototype results are the project's own and unreplicated. Passing automated checks says nothing about whether a record is accurate.
Limitations of the project. No record has been reviewed, witnessed or published. No role other than the founder's is filled. The value frameworks have no authors or reviewers. No forecast has resolved and no scoring has been done. The model configuration that ran is not the one specified, and model plurality is unvalidated. The publisher's confirmation for automated retrieval is outstanding. Dutch legal questions (editorial responsibility, defamation under a no-delete design, election-period rules, data protection for named persons) are unanswered.
Open questions that only operation can answer.
- How much editorial time does one record need, and what weekly capacity follows?
- Do editors' modify and reject rates and seeded-error catch rates hold up over months, or does acceptance become selective?
- Do people who hold a tradition recognise the framework written for it?
- Do domain experts find the alternatives complete and useful?
- Do the targets of dissent recognise it as the strongest case against their position?
- How well does the Clerk agree with lawyers, and how often does it falsely reassure?
- How large are the breaks in forecast records when a model is replaced?
- How often do translation errors change a flag, a premise or a forecast?
- Do outside mirror operators and verifiers actually watch?
- Which interface elements reduce confusion about authority?
- Should a record be kept per list item or per legal instrument, given that the same instrument returns to the Council at several stages?
Disclosure
This paper and the documents it is adapted from were drafted with AI assistance (Claude, a model made by Anthropic). The author holds editorial responsibility for the published text. Anthropic is one of several candidate model providers for State OS, which is a conflict of interest; in the prototype run described in section 12, no Anthropic model was used. State OS has no governmental authority, no government or party funding, and no partnership or affiliation with any public body, including those whose data and publications are cited here.
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How to cite
Tikhonov, A. (2026). State OS: Concept and Architecture. Concept paper, version 1.1-web. The Agentic State, 4 October 2026, revised 5 October 2026. https://agenticstate.institute/en/research/state-os/concept-and-architecture
About this text
Web adaptation of the internal State OS White Paper v1 (23 September 2026), condensed and re-ordered. The project status was updated from the data-access and decision-volume report of 24 September 2026 and from the prototype run of 2 October 2026. Internal ledger references were replaced by external sources, each re-opened on 4 October 2026; claims whose source could not be re-opened were removed. A fictional example record in the source was omitted. Version 1.1-web (5 October 2026) states the project stage and the data and model providers of the prototype run more precisely, and corrects three descriptions of cited studies after comparison with their full texts.
The source white paper and this adaptation were drafted with AI assistance (Claude, a model made by Anthropic); the author holds editorial responsibility for the published text. Anthropic is one of several candidate model providers for State OS, which is a conflict of interest.