The Entitlement Cut: Target-Relative Artifact Sufficiency for Consequential Autonomous Systems

Abstract What must a recorded artifact reveal for an independent evaluator to determine whether a consequential action was entitled under a declared governance contract? This paper separates four requirements: assessment, sound positive certification, enforcement, and completeness. For a declared target on histories and an observation map, it characterizes exact assessment by kernel inclusion: histories indistinguishable through the artifact must have the same target value. The target quotient consequently gives the coarsest sufficient observation at the semantic level, without establishing its computability, affordability, independence, or authenticity. A separate theorem characterizes preservation of a static self-licensing predicate under capability-preserving quotients with transported coalition permissions. Non-retroactivity is declared as a governance premise rather than derived from recording requirements. Enforcement requires sound certification together with an explicit execution-gate contract; accurate assessment alone does not prevent prohibited actions. Finite executable models exhibit the distinctions and counterexamples, with exhaustive enumeration, constructed witnesses, randomized checks, and arithmetic examples separately identified. The paper contributes scoped results toward a general theory of justified epistemic activity for bounded observers. It establishes neither a universally necessary artifact-field list nor authentic history, real-system enforcement, or complete resource-bounded self-revision.