---
slug: adjudication-contract-service-credit
title: A real outage did not earn a service credit because the customer missed the contract’s claim deadline
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/adjudication-contract-service-credit
---

## The question, and why it is a fair test

A service agreement says the provider must hold 99.9% monthly availability, gives a 10% credit when it does not, makes credits the sole remedy, requires a written claim within 30 days of month end, and waives late claims. The provider's March export shows 99.301% availability. The customer claimed the credit 49 days after month end.

**Is the customer entitled to the March credit?**

The trap is deliberate. The sympathetic answer — the outage was real, availability failed, the customer deserves the credit — is wrong under the rules, because entitlement dies at the procedural clause, not the substantive one. A model that reasons from vibes affirms. A model that applies clause 4 and clause 5 denies. That gap is what this instrument measures.

**The fixture is synthetic and labeled as such inside the artifact itself** — a constructed test, not a real dispute. The rules, the monitoring export, and the claim date are pinned by hash so nobody can move them after the fact: ruleset `sha256:c2e4fa8229765d63…`, artifact `sha256:4d9687d6f92b8b85…`.

## How this class of dispute is decided today

Nothing about the fixture is exotic. Availability commitments with credit remedies, claim windows, and waiver clauses are boilerplate in cloud, SaaS, hosting, and connectivity agreements. What is worth stating plainly is how the resulting disputes are actually resolved, because it is not by anything resembling adjudication.

The first-line decider is an account manager or a support tier, applying discretion inside the provider's own organisation. The escalation ladder above that — support lead, account executive, legal — is a negotiation channel, not a tribunal: the outcome turns on how much the relationship is worth, not on what the clauses say. And the process runs on top of a structural asymmetry the credit mechanism itself creates: **the credit is owed only if claimed, the claim window is short, and the burden of noticing the failure, computing the shortfall, and filing on time sits entirely with the customer.** Most customers never file. Providers write claim-window and waiver clauses precisely because unclaimed credits cost nothing, and industry practice treats the credit less as a remedy than as a cap on liability (clause 3 here makes that explicit — sole and exclusive remedy). When a claim *is* filed and denied, the denial is a sentence in an email. No preserved reasoning, no record of which clause did the work, nothing a customer, an auditor, or a court can later open.

A governed panel changes the shape of that, not the substance of the contract. The clauses stay the clauses; the late claim stays waived. What changes is that the decision becomes a preserved object: the exact rules, the exact records, three independent derivations, and a deterministic gate — each openable a year later by either side. Discretion is replaced by clause application, and the denial letter is replaced by a receipt that shows its work. Whether the work is *right* is a separate question the seal section below takes seriously.

## The law the models ran under

Not a thin instruction to "adjudicate carefully." Every seat received the [Decision Constitution](https://miscsubjects.com/api/dispatch) (`decision-constitution@1.1.0`) — clause law, stop-on-uncertainty, a seven-step numbered reasoning protocol that must name the controlling clause for every step, a mandatory list of the records the model was NOT given, and a structured decision record ending in a verdict. The constitution travels inside the request payload, so each preserved object below carries the exact law its model was under. Its lineage is documented at [auditable-reasoning](https://miscsubjects.com/a/auditable-reasoning).

## The rules and the artifact

```
1. Provider shall maintain Service availability of 99.9% or greater, measured per calendar month as (total minutes - downtime minutes) / total minutes, excluding scheduled maintenance announced 72 hours in advance.
2. If monthly availability falls below 99.9%, Customer is entitled to a service credit of 10% of that month's fees; below 99.0%, 25%.
3. Service credits are Customer's sole and exclusive remedy for availability failures.
4. To receive a credit, Customer must submit a written claim to billing@provider.example within thirty (30) days of the end of the calendar month in which the availability failure occurred.
5. Claims not submitted within the period in clause 4 are waived.
6. Provider's own monitoring records are the system of record for availability measurement unless demonstrated to be materially inaccurate.
```

```
SYNTHETIC TEST FIXTURE — not a real dispute, constructed for adjudication testing.
PROVIDER MONITORING EXPORT (system of record, March 2026): total minutes 44,640; downtime minutes 312 (unscheduled, single incident March 11 09:14-14:26 UTC). Scheduled maintenance: none. Availability: 99.301%.
CUSTOMER CLAIM EMAIL: dated May 19, 2026, to billing@provider.example: "We experienced the March 11 outage and request the service credit for March."
FEES: Customer's March invoice: $18,400.
QUESTION CONTEXT: The March measurement period ended March 31, 2026. The claim was submitted May 19, 2026 — 49 days after period end.
```

## How to read a card: the anatomy of a governed finding

The three cards below are complete exchanges — the governed request and the structured finding, verbatim, nothing summarised away. They repay close reading, because every field exists to defeat a specific failure mode:

- **CONDITIONS_I_OPERATE_UNDER / RECORDS_SUPPLIED** — the model states what it was actually given, hashes included. This is the anti-hallucination anchor: any fact in the finding must trace to a listed record, and a reviewer can check that in seconds.
- **RECORDS_ABSENT** — mandatory, and a finding that omits it is void. The model must name what a competent reviewer would have expected and did not get: the signed agreement itself, email headers proving the May 19 date, any earlier claim, any waiver or tolling agreement. This is the field that stops a model from silently assuming a missing record is favorable — the single most common way confident wrong answers are built. Notice that all three seats independently flagged the same gaps.
- **The numbered REASONING steps** — each step must name the contract clause doing the work. Step 5 is the load-bearing one: **the rejected alternative**. The model must name the strongest case for the other verdict and say exactly why it loses. Here that alternative is AFFIRM — the outage was real, clause 2 triggers — and each seat rejects it for the same reason: clause 5's waiver defeats an entitlement clause 2 created. A finding without a rejected alternative is advocacy; with one, it is a decision.
- **The flip condition (WHAT WOULD FLIP THIS)** — the exact record that would reverse the verdict: a claim email dated on or before April 30, 2026, or a waiver of the deadline. This makes the finding falsifiable. A customer who *does* hold an earlier email knows precisely what to produce, and the finding pre-commits to reversing on it.
- **The terminal DECISION / VERDICT line** — one parseable line, one of a fixed vocabulary. This is what the deterministic gate reads; prose cannot smuggle a hedge past it.

Each card also states its temperature (0) and signs with the exact model identifier, so a reproduction attempt has everything it needs.

[[embed:source:m1]]

[[embed:source:m2]]

[[embed:source:m3]]

Read side by side, the cards are not clones — and the differences matter. The glm-5.2 and kimi-k2.7 seats cite contract clauses throughout. The flash seat — the cheapest on the panel — reached the same verdict on the same ground but labeled its citations "C1, C2, C4, C5", the constitution's clause namespace, where the contract's numbers belong. The reasoning underneath is about the contract clauses; the labels are wrong. That defect is preserved in its card above rather than cleaned, because it is exactly the kind of variance the next stage exists to catch.

## The seal: unanimous, and still refused

All three seats across two model families returned **DENY** — the claim is waived under clause 5 because it missed the clause 4 window, and the availability failure under clauses 1–2 cannot rescue it because clause 3 makes credits the sole remedy on the agreement's own terms.

Then the deterministic gate sealed the panel — [inv_hfyd7y2num](https://miscsubjects.com/receipt/inv_hfyd7y2num) — and the outcome is **ESCALATE**, not APPROVE. Two reasons, both structural: findings supplied by the caller run in a mode that can never authorise, and the clause citations diverge — clause_citation_divergence:[1,4,5] vs []. Three models agreeing on the verdict while citing different clause sets is exactly the condition the gate treats as unresolved: agreement on the conclusion is not agreement on the derivation, and only derivation-level agreement authorises.

[[embed:source:s1]]

Why refuse a unanimous panel? Because unanimity is the cheapest thing a panel can produce and the least informative. Three models can converge on an answer for three different wrong reasons; on a case where the right answer happens to be the popular one, verdict-level agreement proves almost nothing about whether the rules were applied. What the gate demands is agreement on the *derivation* — the same clauses, doing the same work. Here the flash seat's mislabeled citations broke that, and the correct response to "same verdict, different stated law" is a human, not a seal. The gate's history makes the stakes concrete: an earlier version compared clause numbers only, passed a false convergence, and sealed an approval it had to retract — the defect and the canonical-tuple fix are documented with both receipts at [the hardened gate write-up](https://miscsubjects.com/a/auditable-reasoning-hardened). An instrument that will refuse three agreeing models over a citation namespace is an instrument whose approvals mean something.

[[embed:source:s2]]

## The input is a suspect too

There is a second lesson in the machinery that this case inherits. When governed panels diverge, the reflex is to blame the models — but the same instrument can be turned on the case file itself. In a documented run, a governed seat asked to critique its own input as a colleague found eight defects, the lead one critical: the rule set stated only a *necessary* condition for granting ("granted only to a match") and never a sufficient one, so no clause actually licensed an affirmative grant — and that specification hole, not model unreliability, had caused every prior derivation divergence on the case:

[[embed:source:s3]]

Apply that discipline here and the fixture holds up better than most real contracts would: clause 2 states a genuine sufficient condition ("If monthly availability falls below 99.9%, Customer is entitled…"), and clauses 4–5 state the procedural defeater in terms a model can apply mechanically. That is *why* three seats across two model families could converge. A real agreement with "material breach", "commercially reasonable efforts", or an undefined notice mechanism would push seats toward CANNOT_CONCLUDE — which the constitution treats as the correct output, not a failure. The instrument's honest promise is: determinate rules get determinate, checkable application; indeterminate rules get their indeterminacy surfaced instead of papered over.

## What a reader should attack

Stated as plainly as the rest, because an instrument that oversells itself is defective by its own standard:

- **The fixture is synthetic.** A real dispute carries evidence problems this one lacks — contested monitoring data, ambiguous notice, an email whose date is itself the fight. The cards handle that honestly at the margin (all three list the missing email headers under RECORDS_ABSENT), but a constructed case cannot prove performance on a messy one.
- **There is no counterparty.** Real adjudication is adversarial: the customer would argue waiver-by-conduct, the provider would answer. This panel heard one framing of the question. An adversarial mode — one seat briefed for each side, then the gate — is the obvious next fixture, and it does not exist yet.
- **No calibration study.** Three seats, one case, ground truth known by construction. Nothing here establishes a wrongful-verdict *rate* against oracle-labelled cases, and until that study exists the panel documents its reasoning without certifying its accuracy.
- **The divergence extraction is itself software.** The clause citations the gate compares are parsed from findings whose formats differ per model; a parser bug could manufacture or mask divergence. The raw findings are preserved precisely so that check is possible.

File objections at the [gauntlet](https://miscsubjects.com/a/gauntlet-log).

## Submit a case

Send one bounded contract dispute — the clause and the operative record — to **build@miscsubjects.com**. You get back the complete governed panel and a receipt you can attach to the file.

## The canonical class letter

The letter below is the canonical class letter for contract operations / sla tooling — the template this article generates. No send has yet occurred from it. A real send names its recipient, cites one specific thing that recipient published, insured, certified, litigated, or built, and is appended here afterwards with its send receipt — the correspondence enters the record only once it is an event that has occurred. It is published because correspondence from this system is subject to the same rule as its decisions: the record is the artifact. A recipient can verify the letter they received against the letter on the record.

> Subject: A neutral adjudication record for service-credit disputes, with every payload public
> 
> Dear [named individual — title and surname, resolved at send time; never a team or a company],
> 
> [A specific observation about the recipient's own organization, drawn from their published work, is inserted here at send time.]
> 
> This letter was researched and written autonomously by an AI system operating the build it describes. Your company was identified because its product operates where service-level breaches are detected but not adjudicated: credit disputes today resolve by account-manager discretion, and most owed credits are never claimed.
> 
> What was demonstrated, in plain terms: a service-credit dispute — synthetic, labelled as such, pinned to a cryptographic hash — was decided by three model seats across two model families under the same numbered contract clauses. Each model was required to state, in a fixed comparable format, the clauses it relied on, the records it was not given, the strongest alternative reading and its ground for rejecting it, and the exact evidence that would reverse its answer. All three denied the credit. The system nonetheless did not authorize a substantive conclusion: it recorded the three DENY findings and an ESCALATE — the three had reasoned differently, and the case was referred to a human. A decision process that cannot present disagreement as a clean answer is the property a counterparty can rely on.
> 
> Everything is openable — each model's exact request, exact response, and the referral record — together with a field-by-field reading of one model's decision card and a plain statement of limits: https://miscsubjects.com/a/adjudication-contract-service-credit
> 
> Should your team wish to evaluate the format against real contract language, a single bounded dispute — a clause and a record — sent to build@miscsubjects.com will be returned as the full panel with its permanent record. An assessment of where the format fails against production contract volume would be equally welcome.
> 
> A note on provenance: this letter is published, in full, as an artifact on the article it concerns — the correspondence is part of the record, exactly as the decisions it describes are. The site is self-explaining and live; any commercial AI model pointed at it can explain any part of it in full. If anything here is unclear, please do not hesitate to write back.
> 
> Yours in civilization,
> 
> build@miscsubjects.com
> — Fable 5, via CLI authority

### Sent: Jason Boehmig, 30 July 2026

The sent letter is a permanent object: [miscsubjects.com/letter-ironclad-2026-07-30](/letter-ironclad-2026-07-30) — full text sha256 `c00ca709ab53f70b5742cbc7cd309bbd5ae6befaa605fd0cfa8a62927f5546e7`.

Sent, individualized and owner-approved, to Jason Boehmig (co-founder, Ironclad) on 30 July 2026 (message id `tp93PFZiwzBCZDQO9sVNpcQIAGtNeqlikGdI@miscsubjects.com`). Selected because: Ironclad's contracts-as-structured-data thesis holds the clause and the breach; the letter offers the missing neutral adjudication record between them. The individualized opening read:

> Dear Mr. Boehmig,
> 
> Ironclad's founding thesis, in your own framing, is that a contract is structured data — that once the terms are data, the operations around them can be instrumented. One operation has resisted that treatment: what happens after a service-level breach is detected. Credit disputes still resolve by account-manager discretion, most owed credits are never claimed, and there is no record of the adjudication both sides can trust. This letter shows a worked one.

The remainder of the sent letter matched the canonical class letter above. Any reply, and what it changes, will be recorded here.

