Cognitive-Continuity Safety Protocol for Persistent and Self-Influencing Artificial Cognitive Systems

This document defines a conditional technical safety protocol for persistent or self-influencing artificial cognitive deployments in which memory, structural change, continuity-sensitive decisions, or oversight relations become governance-relevant safety objects. The protocol is normative only within a declared adopting authority and deployment scope. Its obligations are not deductive consequences of GTCS, Inter-System Conflict, AIS01, continuity theory, or any other descriptive framework. The architecture separates screening from applicability, focal technical continuation from preservation of a declared wider-continuity target, protocol-local technical-continuity substitution warnings from the stricter construct of technical self-continuity capture, protected protocol constraints from Core invariants, and protocol review decisions from imported formal statuses. A wider-continuity basis must explicitly declare the focal technical carrier, wider organization, continuity criterion, relevant functions or relations, carrier configuration, evaluation horizon, context, authority basis, and provenance. Continuation, replication, or stability of the focal technical system is therefore not treated as sufficient evidence that the wider target is preserved. The protocol introduces stage-specific review, trigger and escalation records, independent-review contracts, and a four-status machine-readable grammar that keeps READY_POSITIVE, COMPLETED_NEGATIVE, UNDEFINED, and NOT_APPLICABLE distinct. Review approval is stage-local. Output, action, persistent-memory, structural-change, identity-continuity, wider-continuity, and independent-review decisions are not interchangeable and do not establish positivity of imported GTCS, ISC, CEBSLC, WGWP, or other owner-defined statuses. Compliance is coverage-sensitive and authority-relative. A compliant classification records satisfaction of declared protocol obligations; it does not constitute empirical validation of safety, absence of risk, or proof of any underlying structural construct. The protocol is intended to complement rather than replace ordinary AI safety, cybersecurity, legal, institutional, governance, and empirical validation procedures.