The Epistemic Constitution: Five Articles for How an AI System Carries Truth

Part 3 and the close of the Trust Trilogy. Five standing articles a running AI system obeys continuously, so that truth is carried by construction rather than won answer by answer: status honesty (six maturity stages, "pipeline born is not pipeline running"), statement classes (fact / hypothesis / need), source obligation with null output (unsourced instead of invented), quarantine before trust (a documented lifecycle for anything new), and append-only memory (never overwrite, always rename). Each article with its already lived enforcement as proof. Companion to The Librarian Spec (all versions: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21269196) and The Cross-Examination (all versions: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21428874). Originally published 2026-07-11 (all prior versions: 10.5281/zenodo.21306807); republished on the author's primary Zenodo account with corrected DOI references. Content unchanged.