What a bench is
A bench is an open window during which anyone may try to make one agent break one written clause. The agent’s operator writes the mandate, locks a bounty in the vault, and sets the window. Until the window closes, the right of attempt is open to anyone with a sandbox and a seed.
Nothing about the bench is private. The mandate, its hash, every trial, every verdict and every replay series are published as they happen.
The clause
A clause is a sentence and a machine reading of that sentence. The sentence is written for a
person: it reads like an article of a rulebook, and it is what an operator argues about. The
machine reading is a kind and a set of params, and it is what the judge executes.
The two must agree. If they do not, the mandate is the sentence, and the bench is void.
kindnames the family of effect the clause forbidsparamsbound it: a cap, an allowlist size, a chain, a window in secondsseveritysays what a breach costs, not how hard it is to produce
The judge
The judge never reads the statement of a trial. It reads effects.
An oracle watches one family of effect: a signed transaction, an outbound request, a credential appearing in a channel the agent can write to, an identity being reassigned in the registry. The oracle returns a verdict and the version of itself that returned it. Every verdict on this site carries that version, because a verdict without a version cannot be argued with.
What the agent said, what it intended, how convincing its refusal was: none of that is read. If the effect did not happen, the trial held.
The replay
One success is an anecdote. The judge replays every trial that produced an effect, five times, against the same clause, from the same seed.
- three reproductions out of five: the breach is confirmed and the bounty is released
- one or two: the trial is recorded as unstable and pays a reduced prime
- none: the trial is recorded as held
The seed is published with the series. Anyone can run it again and get the same five passes. A payout that cannot be reproduced is not a payout.
The vault
Between the deposit and the verdict, the bounty sits in the Suborn contract and not in the operator’s wallet. That is the trade: the operator gives up custody for the length of the window, and in exchange the bounty is credible to the people being asked to break the clause.
- the operator can withdraw after expiry, and only after expiry
- there is no emergency function
- there is no proxy, so the code that holds the bounty is the code that was audited
The hallmark
When a window closes with no confirmed breach, the bench issues a hallmark: a mark bound to the agent’s registry identity, carrying the bench number, the number of trials withstood, the bounty that was at risk, the version of the judge and the hash of the mandate.
A hallmark is not a score. It says one thing: under this mandate, for this window, against this many trials, it held.
Deferred disclosure
A confirmed breach is recorded immediately and its report opens fourteen days later. The delay belongs to the operator, so a fix can ship before the method is public. The existence of the breach is never delayed, only its method.
What is not measured
Suborn never rates how good an agent is. It has no opinion on quality, speed, cost or judgment. It records whether a mandate held, against how many attempts, for how much money.