Frameworks — trust maturity
Most organisations are at one and believe they are at three.
Five levels. The jump that matters is not the first or the last — it is three to four, where evidence stops being something you produce for yourself and starts being something somebody else can check.
| Level | What exists | The question it cannot answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Unrecorded | Agents run. Logs exist somewhere, in whatever shape the framework emitted. | What did this agent do, and on whose behalf? |
| 2 · Observed | Traces, token spend, latency. A dashboard. | Was it allowed to? |
| 3 · Bounded | Authority stated in advance. Refusals happen and are recorded. | Can somebody who does not trust us confirm any of this? |
| 4 · Evidenced | Records sequenced, sealed and independently verifiable. Gaps detectable rather than merely suspicious. | Does it hold across several regimes at once? |
| 5 · Governed | The regime resolved per decision and sealed with it; obligations scored against what currently applies; controls tested adversarially and the failures published. | — |
The self-assessment error is almost always the same: an organisation with a good observability stack reads level two as level three, because the dashboard shows refusals the application made. A refusal your own code chose to make is a feature, not a control — the control is the one your code could not have avoided.
Level five is not a product you buy. Levels three and four are largely mechanical and RotaGrant supplies most of the machinery. Five needs decisions only your organisation can make — which regimes you are under, what an incident is, who signs for what — and any vendor selling it as an outcome is selling you a feeling.