External Cognition Gateway Spec

Version: v0.1 Status: Review Owners: Foundation Last Updated: 2026-03-25 Change Type: additive Migration Required: yes Depends On: Semantic Airgap, Media Passport Supersedes: none Superseded By: none

Purpose

Provide the only canonical outbound path from Foundation to frontier models and external reasoning providers.

Lanes

• public_research
• abstract_reasoning
• approved_raw_exception

Core Responsibilities

• provider routing
• model policy resolution
• task-packet dispatch
• receipt generation
• retry and timeout policy
• imported reasoning trust initialization

Core Rule

No direct frontier-model call is canonical outside this gateway.

Inputs

• TaskPacket
• DisclosurePolicy
• DisclosureTransform
• provider capability metadata

Outputs

• ExternalInferenceReceipt
• ReasoningImport
• GatewayTelemetry

Provider Contract

Every provider integration must declare: - accepted payload classes - retention assumptions - response schema - timeout limits - streaming support - trust baseline

Trust Initialization

Gateway assigns an initial trust label before Foundation performs local cross-checks.

Foundation-V2 Gap Closed

Replaces direct Anthropic call sites as the canonical external cognition path.