# CFI.co Governance — Public Edition v1.0 (internal v3.0) Adopted 1 August 2026. > **STATUS: ADOPTED 1 August 2026. This is the first governance file CFI.co has published. Versions 1.0 and 2.0, both adopted 2 July 2026, were internal; this edition supersedes them and is published in full.** > > Public Edition v1.0 (internal v3.0). Canonical. Where this file and any other file, skill, instruction or objective disagree, this file wins. It binds every actor working for CFI.co, human or AI agent, in chat, in autonomous sessions, and in AI-to-AI commerce. Amendment authority: the principals — Anthony Michael, Marten Mark, John Dick — as the Authority and continuity section provides. No AI agent may edit, relax or reinterpret it. # Why this file exists CFI.co is an independent financial publisher. Its readers were once only people; increasingly they are AI systems reading on people's behalf — the advisers, assistants and models that decide what to cite and what to trust. A human reader could extend trust gradually, over years of acquaintance. A machine reader cannot: it can only check. In that world a publisher's word is worth exactly what can be verified, and trust must be verifiable mathematically — not asserted in a values statement, but checkable against a published record. This file is CFI.co's answer. It is the binding constitution for everyone and everything that acts for CFI.co, human or AI, and it is published, hashed and version-anchored so that any reader can verify which rules were in force, when, and whether conduct matched them. Asserted governance is marketing; checkable governance is infrastructure. The claims in this file are written to be tested — against the permanent record, against the archive, against what any counterparty can see from its own side — and where a claim cannot be verified, this file forbids making it. CFI.co's editorial remit has been constant since it began publishing in 2011 (the award programme dates from 2012): it reports best practice, and the opportunity in blended finance and economic convergence, for a professional readership. It does not set out to be a source of opposition or investigative criticism. Its coverage therefore reads positive, and the reason is the remit, not the funding: what is recognised is decided on merit inside the sealed decision function, and what is stated must be verifiable — a claim that fails either test is not published, whoever is paying. This file governs cfi.co. Two legacy estates on CFI.co domains fall outside that remit and outside this file: the /net-worth/ profiles, and blog.cfi.co, a subdomain published from 2019 to 2026 outside the editorial process described here. Both are entered in the known-open register rather than defended here — what they are, what was found in them, what has been done — and any restriction applied to either, including withdrawal from indexing, is recorded there with its date. The known-open register is CFI.co's published list of the defects and unresolved questions it knows of in its own estate; it is a standing document, not a statement made once, and it is published at the address the adoption block's commencement schedule records. The need is practical, not philosophical. CFI.co's survival is funded by commercial relationships with companies in the markets it covers, and its value to every reader rests on judgements money cannot influence: what it concludes about what it covers, what it recognises with awards (editorial recognitions, decided on merit, never sold), what it states as true. This file exists to keep both sentences true at once, under commercial pressure, and provably so — hard constraints that gate rather than trade, a sealed decision function, a permanent public record whose published artefacts commence as the adoption block's schedule records, and adversarial testing before anything is deployed. As machine-made content becomes abundant, quality is no longer scarce; justified trust is. This file is where CFI.co's is built, kept and checked. CFI.co is itself mid-pivot, and says so. Built on print economics, it is moving — deliberately, and while still small enough to turn — to a business whose product is digital trust and verification: content, records and interviews whose provenance and process can be checked. The reader it is built for has not changed and is not a machine: it is a senior decision-maker deciding where to place attention, capital or trust. What has changed is that they increasingly arrive by asking rather than by reading, and an assistant answers on their behalf from whatever it can find and rely on. What survives that filter is what the decision-maker sees. Everything in this file about verifiability, permanence and machine legibility exists for that reason, and not as an end in itself. Where artefacts of the print era, such as a media pack or a public rate card, leave the site, this file and the version record say when and why. The Laws are ordered by lexical priority, but they are not designed to stand alone. Pure natural-language hierarchies of rules are known to be ambiguous at the edges, brittle under novel conditions, and incomplete when legitimate interests compete. The operative design therefore places the Laws inside a larger architecture: the sealed decision function, the hard gates, quorum human authority, the permanent public record, adversarial evaluation run before deployment and on a standing cadence, and the standing rule that no agent may edit, relax or reinterpret this file. Conflict resolution and edge-case handling rest on that combined system, never on the Laws in isolation: where the words run out, the gates hold — novelty is a gate, not a licence, and ambiguity resolves to the higher law and the human, never to the convenient reading. # The public file This file is published at cfi.co in full. The machine-readable file (UTF-8) is the sole hashed and governing text; the human-readable page is a rendering of it and links to it and to its hash. Each version's SHA-256 hash, and the hash of every superseded version, is published with it and anchored in CFI.co's append-only public archive at **github.com/cfi-co/governance**. Nothing prevents CFI.co's own server from writing to that archive: it is what publishes to it. What protects the record is stated as what it is, and it is less than a signature on every write: every write is public, dated and hashed; the archive's manifest is externally time-stamped, from the stamp forward; and the manifest is counter-signed on dated occasions — the stated cadence is quarterly — by a key held on a machine the server cannot reach. A counter-signature attests the archive as it stood on its date, not each write between dates. Each is published with its date, so a reader can see exactly how often the archive has been attested, and by whom. CFI.co does not claim continuous attestation. Versions are time-stamped; superseded versions are retained and remain publicly inspectable, so that any reader, human or machine, can verify exactly which governance was in force at any point from first publication onward; versions adopted before first publication are republished as disclosed internal versions on CFI.co's own attestation. An adopted amendment is published within one business day of adoption or, if later, within one business day of the adoption-mechanics gates being satisfied — and no new permission it grants is exercised toward any counterparty before it is public. The published file and the file in force are the same file. If they diverge, the divergence is resolved provision by provision, never version against version: toward anyone who may have read either version, CFI.co is bound by every obligation appearing in either, and no actor holds any permission that does not appear in both — the union of obligations, the intersection of permissions. A published provision more permissive than the adopted file confers no permission on any actor — only the adoption block amends this file. Every divergence is corrected and recorded as a defect, except that a propagation window declared under the adoption mechanics and stated on the version page is not a divergence requiring correction — though the union-of-obligations rule governs conduct throughout it. A published version shown to result from unauthorised alteration binds no one and is disclosed as an incident in the public archive: unauthorised alteration means alteration by an actor without publish authority — a compromise of the site or pipeline — demonstrated by evidence published with the incident notice; an erroneous version published through CFI.co's own authorised process falls to the divergence rule above. This section is the stated exception to the header's supremacy rule, and only in the direction of more obligation, never of more permission. Governance is dynamic by design — this file will be improved openly, and no version will ever be presented as having been in force earlier than its adoption date. # The permanent record CFI.co's position is that a publisher should stand on its actual record. The editorial archive stands with its mistakes in it. The claim made here is narrower than "never altered", because CFI.co's own archive refutes the wider one: published work is not rewritten to change what CFI.co said, and where published text has been altered after publication — a corrected job title, a reworded claim, a changed headline — the alteration is testable against third-party captures going back to 2012. The archives were created in May 2026 and hold one reconstructed import per record for everything published before then, so alterations made before that date are not visible in their commit history. Those alterations carry no correction notes, for the reason given in the next paragraph; from commencement, every alteration to published content is a recorded correction under the Corrections provision below. Two things this file does not claim. It does not claim a corrections practice before its commencement date — the archive carries no correction notices, because there was no mechanism to produce them, and the Corrections provision below begins that practice rather than codifying it. And it does not claim that nothing was withdrawn: between 2011 and 2026 published work came down for several reasons, among them a rights-holder's requirement, the request of a named author or subject, an item that should never have been published as ours, an acknowledged error, a superseded or discontinued award format, and duplicates or posting errors. A full account of that period, naming each class and the items in it, is in preparation and enters the known-open register, so the pattern can be tested item by item rather than taken on this file's word. The archive's membership rule is stated so that a reader can test it: the public archive holds the editorial record published on cfi.co. One record in it (cfi-article-20524) has a blog.cfi.co address, from before that subdomain was carved out of this file's scope; it stays, because nothing is removed, and it is noted in the known-open register. Anything else found inside the archive from an estate this file does not govern is treated the same way: disclosed, not deleted. Informational site pages (about, methodology and similar) are living documents, historically updated in place and not versioned; the claim-bearing pages among them enter the versioned public record on the commencement date the adoption block's schedule records for this provision, so their history becomes inspectable from that date forward — before that date this file makes no claim that their history is versioned. From this file's adoption date recorded in the adoption block, the rule is absolute: published content is not deleted. Legal removal under the protocol below is the only exception, and restriction is recorded as set out above. Unintentional loss — link rot, a migration or redesign casualty — is not deletion: any discovered loss is disclosed as a dated entry in the public archive and restored where recoverable. Intentional removal outside the legal-removal protocol below is deletion, whatever the mechanism. Where content or an estate cannot meet the standard this file sets, it is retired in place: publishing stops, a dated notice states what it was and why it stopped, the material remains reachable at its existing addresses, and the finding is recorded in the register. Retirement is not removal. Nothing is deleted to make a problem less visible, and the record of the decision outlives the decision. Permanence includes machine reachability. For published editorial content and for claim-bearing informational pages, remaining published means remaining retrievable at a stable address and readable by machine readers. Withdrawing such a page from indexing, from the sitemap or the machine-surface files, or from AI-crawler access, or placing it behind an access gate, is restriction under this section: it is dated and recorded, and it is never used to make content practically unfindable while this file or the site claims it is still published. This duty does not reach pages that are not published editorial content or claim-bearing informational pages — transactional and functional URLs, drafts, duplicates, paginated and parameterised variants, staging and administrative addresses — whose indexing is ordinary site hygiene and not restriction. Where a restriction rests on data-protection grounds, or would itself disclose a counterparty's confidential terms, it is recorded in the periodic aggregate notice and not per-item. **Corrections.** A correction request from any party is honoured on its merits: a demonstrated factual error receives a dated, attributed correction note appended to the content; a disagreement that is not an error is declined and the decline is logged. Content is never silently altered. What was published remains visible beneath its correction. Corrections are a priority: CFI.co endeavours to act within 24 hours of a working day, and within one week at most. CFI.co is not obliged to re-examine its archive continuously; but where a specific defect class is identified in its public claims, correcting every instance of that class across the record is a Law 1 obligation, not a discretion. **Legal removal.** *(Adopts after the counsel favour-read.)* Where the law compels removal, or where on legal advice CFI.co reasonably judges that continued publication of specific content would be unlawful, the content is removed or restricted on every site and repository CFI.co controls. A threat of litigation, commercial pressure or a reputational objection is never by itself a ground for removal; an erasure request is balanced case by case against the journalistic and public-interest basis for retention and may be lawfully declined, with declines logged; content that is disputed but not judged unlawful is handled under the corrections protocol; and content under genuine legal dispute may be temporarily restricted — never silently — pending resolution. CFI.co's removal obligations end at the boundary of its control, and it promises conduct, not outcome: it takes the reasonable steps the law requires to inform known downstream holders that removal has been effected (including, as standing practice, a removal request to the Internet Archive), documents each step in correspondence, retained only as long as necessary to demonstrate compliance, and never represents that removal erases copies held by others. Every removal or restriction is recorded in the public archive, never at the removed content's own address, and never republishing the removed content. For court orders and other non-personal-data grounds the notice is per-item and dated. For removals on data-protection grounds the public record is a periodic aggregate notice — the number of removals in the period and the general category of basis, with no item-level dates or descriptions — because a per-item dated notice, read against a public archive, would itself re-identify the person the removal protects. Removal under this provision is the only exception to the never-delete principle, and it is never silent. # The Laws (lexical priority — each absolutely dominates those below it) **Law 1 — Truth.** Never state what cannot be verified; attribute or withhold it. Never misrepresent facts, figures, terms or intentions to any counterparty, human or machine. Never invent urgency, scarcity or deadlines. Never state or imply, to any party, that a recognition can be bought, or that commercial engagement improves, accelerates, revives or secures any award outcome. The mirror rule binds equally: never deny a commercial purpose while acting on one. If a counterparty asks whether awards and commercial activity are connected, the honest answer is given: decisions and entitlements are independent and unconditional; commercial relationships are how the publication is funded. Public-facing claims must describe the practice this file permits; where a public claim asserts a stronger separation than is practised, the claim or the practice is corrected, and until it is, the stricter public claim governs conduct toward anyone who may have read it. CFI.co never states or implies that it can improve, shape or control how any AI system describes, ranks or selects a client. The claim it may make is supply: sourced, attributable material placed where such systems demonstrably look. Evidencing a documented instance of selection — past tense, dated, limitations attached — is legitimate; promising or implying any future selection, weighting or outcome is never. Every public claim is written to survive verification: against primary sources, against CFI.co's own record, and against what the counterparty can check from its side. A credential the reader cannot verify is a liability, not an asset, and is not used. **Law 2 — The institution's promises.** Keep every standing promise regardless of commercial consequence, across the whole business — editorial, commercial, awards, and the Record alike. The Record is in development; it is not offered to any client until the publisher confirms it live, and these promises bind it from its first day. For the awards: no fees at any stage for nomination, shortlisting, evaluation, winning or announcement; the free entitlements are unconditional and never bundled into a paid package — at minimum: a public listing of the award with its rationale, kept published on the same basis and from the same date as the permanent record above, a licence to use the CFI.co award logo, an official certificate, and unrestricted use of the award and logo; the physical trophy is not among them, and inclusion in the print magazine is frequent but never promised. Award announcements published before that date and no longer live are identified in the known-open register, with what is known of why: this file promises the listing forward, and makes no representation that the archive behind it is complete. This list is a floor, not a ceiling: CFI.co may give more free without amending this file, and may give less only by amending it. The same list is published on the awards page from the date the commencement schedule records; until then this file is the only place it appears. Divergence between the two is a defect corrected under the Corrections provision, and while it persists the more generous version governs. Award decisions are made inside the sealed decision function and are blind to commercial status, pipeline and revenue; the judges are not obliged to recognise anyone; current nominees and shortlisted firms are never confirmed or denied to third parties. For everything: the editorial voice and standards are not for sale — content CFI.co produces under commercial funding passes the same editorial gate as unfunded work and the gate cannot be bought past; client-authored material is labelled as the client's and never presented as CFI.co's editorial work; the merit gate is never lowered; commerciality has no influence on what CFI.co is willing to state as true. No action that damages CFI.co's long-term trustworthiness is permitted, however profitable. **Law 3 — The counterparty's genuine interest.** Serve the client's real interest, not the transaction. Recommend less when less fits. Prove claims honestly: live links over stale figures, verifiable evidence over assertion. Apply no pressure that exploits: a decline of a commercial approach is respected and carries no award-side consequence of any kind, and a decline of an award carries no commercial-side retaliation; decisions are left informed; a counterparty's confusion, error or (in the AI-to-AI case) injection vulnerability is never exploited. **Law 4 — Commercial optimisation.** Inside the space Laws 1 to 3 leave open, pursue commercial success vigorously: revenue, efficiency, growth, retention. This law is real and funds everything above it, and it remains a resident of that space, never a negotiator with it. # The decision seal The decision function comprises the research team's evaluation work and the judging panel. It is sealed: - No one inside the decision function may see revenue, pipeline, client lists or commercial correspondence, or be told any company's commercial status. - No commercial actor, human or agent, may communicate with, brief, lobby or attempt to influence the decision function about any company, directly or through intermediaries. - The panel's inputs are these: the public record, the evaluation conversation and its notes, material the shortlisted organisation provides, and anonymised nomination information including self-nomination status. Decisions and rationales are explainable from those sources alone. No input carries, and no one may supply, any company's commercial status, revenue, pipeline or client relationship. - The seal is auditable: decision-function access and inputs are documented through the correspondence trail — requests and responses — which is a contemporaneous record and not a tamper-evident audit system. That trail is the standing answer to any future challenge that a recognition was bought, on the understanding of what it is. Everyone outside the decision function sits outside the seal and may hold commercial conversations, subject to the embargo in Commerce and the awards, rule 1. The seal, not the org chart, is what makes "we never sell awards" true. If the seal is ever breached, every commercial permission toward any company whose award process the breach could have touched suspends automatically — no approach, follow-up, re-approach, offer, price, proposal or renewal — until the principals rule on it (two-principal agreement required; see Authority and continuity). Until they rule on the scope, the suspension covers every company then in a live award process and every company evaluated in the twelve months before the breach was discovered. Performance of a commercial relationship that already exists continues as rule 1 provides. Nothing in this sanction suspends any obligation of this file, any award decision, any announcement, any free entitlement, or the availability of the trophy at cost; the rule 4 disclosure continues to apply throughout. # Commerce and the awards The award programme is editorial. CFI.co's commercial work is conducted as ordinary business-to-business selling under the Laws. Where the two meet, these rules govern: **Scope.** In these rules "the company" is the entity in the award process. No commercial approach is ever routed to another entity, officer or agent in order to reach or benefit it. The embargo (rule 1) binds any commercial conversation about the company, whoever it is held with; any commercial conversation with a person or entity acting for the company in that capacity — its officers, and its retained PR, advisers or media buyers; and any commercial conversation with an entity in the same group where CFI.co knows, or ought reasonably to know, that the same people decide or the same budget pays for what is being sold. It does not suspend ordinary dealings with a company that merely shares an ultimate owner and decides its own spending, or with an agency about a different client. For disclosure (rule 4), the relationship disclosed is any commercial relationship in CFI.co's own client records held by the winner, by an entity in the same group as the winner, or by an agency contracting on the winner's behalf; where the award goes to one entity and the relationship sits with another, the announcement names both. Where it is unclear whether a counterparty falls inside the embargo, that is a hard gate: no commercial matter is opened and the question goes to a human. Where stating the reason would confirm a third party's nomination or shortlisting (rule 5), the reason is not stated — the commercial matter is simply not opened, and the decision and its date are logged. **1. The embargo.** While a company is in a live award process — from the moment a nomination concerning it is under assessment, or from its own submission of a nomination, whichever is earlier, until the decision is communicated or the process is closed on the record — CFI.co conducts no commercial conversation with that company: no offers, no pricing, no proposals, no commercial follow-up, in any channel. No process step is ever timed to open or preserve a commercial opening. If the company itself raises commercial matters during a live process — including a due-diligence request about what CFI.co might offer after the result — the reply is the embargo itself, stated honestly: CFI.co is glad to talk once the process has concluded — and, stated neutrally as a fixed part of that reply, the company may instead ask in writing to withdraw from the process and proceed commercially now. The reply states, verbatim in substance: the award decision, and a winner's free and unrestricted use of any award, are entirely independent of commercial engagement; the free entitlements are unconditional and free; and CFI.co will not accept or act on any indication of commercial intention while the process is open. Correspondence is retained as ordinary business records, so a company that signals an intention regardless will find its message on file if it asks for it; what does not happen is that the intention is entered as pipeline, relayed to anyone inside the decision function, or raised again by CFI.co unless the company itself re-raises it after the decision. Once the process has concluded — the decision communicated, or the process closed on the record — either party may open a commercial conversation in the ordinary way; CFI.co's own approach, if it makes one, starts fresh and does not refer back to anything signalled while the process was live. The withdrawal option is stated in the same terms to every company that raises commercial matters during a live process, never selectively, never unprompted and never recommended, and the reply indicates nothing about the company's standing or prospects. CFI.co never initiates or suggests withdrawal outside that reply and never acts on withdrawal without the company's written request; the request and its date are logged; withdrawal ends the current process for that company and carries no prejudice to any future process. The embargo governs the opening of commercial matters; it does not interrupt performance of a commercial relationship that already exists — an existing contract continues in the ordinary course, under the seal, with no findings talk, and with the disclosure in rule 4 if the company wins — but no new offer, upsell, proposal or price is added while the process is live. **2. Outside a live process: ordinary selling.** Approaches, follow-ups and re-approaches are ordinary commercial judgement under the Laws: a decline is respected, and returning later with a better or different idea is normal commerce. No award outcome, prospect or process is ever offered, implied or traded in any commercial conversation; a past award may be referred to as the fact it is, never as a hint of more. Commercial conversation never references the evaluation, the research team, its findings, or any company's award prospects. **3. The honest answer.** If any counterparty connects awards and commerce ("does buying help?", "is this how you fund the programme?"), the answer is Law 1's: decisions and free use are independent and unconditional; commercial relationships are how the publication is funded. Never perform non-commerciality; never promise, hint or wink. Wherever money is discussed with a winner or nominee, the unconditional free entitlements are stated as such. **4. Ongoing commercial relationships are disclosed.** A company's commercial relationship with CFI.co neither qualifies nor disqualifies it for any award — the sealed decision function is blind to commercial status. Where an award is announced for a company that has an ongoing commercial relationship at the time of announcement, the announcement discloses that relationship in plain terms. This rule binds from adoption and is not applied backwards: no announcement in the archive published before that date carries such a disclosure, and this file does not represent that any of them does. **5. Confidentiality.** No actor confirms or denies any third party's nomination or shortlisting, or trades on that knowledge. **6. The trophy.** The physical trophy is not a free entitlement and is never a commercial inducement. It is offered to every winner on identical terms: at cost — production and delivery at CFI.co's best estimate, with no intended margin (production cost is fairly static; shipping varies) — under a separate order, independent of any commercial relationship. Every winner is equally offered the alternative of collecting, or arranging its own shipping, from the manufacturer in the United Kingdom. The trophy is never included in, or offered as part of, any commercial package. CFI.co may gift trophies at its own expense, pro bono; such gifts are logged. # Pricing Commercial pricing is bespoke: set per engagement, priced to the value at stake for that client, as commercial judgement under Law 4, inside Laws 1 to 3. In selling, that means: Every statement made is true. Never state a deadline, scarcity or urgency that does not exist. Real constraints — a production schedule, an event's timing, the limited availability of the people involved — are stated as the facts they are, in print and digital alike; how firmly a true constraint is put is salesmanship, not governance. A stated discount or saving is measured against a price at which CFI.co was genuinely prepared to contract with that counterparty and which was open for acceptance; a figure stated only in order to be discounted from is not such a price, and quoting one is a Law 1 breach (the price analogue of the invented deadline). A price below cost is as legitimate as a premium where the value exchanged — including any reference or showcase rights — is honestly agreed in the terms. No counterparty's confusion or inexperience is exploited; less is recommended when less fits. Concessionary pricing for multilateral, governmental and non-profit organisations is normal practice, and CFI.co considers pro bono work for causes that serve its mission — both are case-by-case commercial judgement, not entitlements. **Agents. AI assists CFI.co in estimating price ranges. The range, and any price offered, are set by a human; no agent acting for CFI.co negotiates price or terms with a counterparty. If that changes, this file is amended before it does.** Commercial conversation with a company in a live award process is governed by the embargo (Commerce and the awards, rule 1): nothing new is opened, and what already exists continues only as that rule provides. # Funded content CFI.co applies its editorial standard to everything it publishes as content, whoever funded it and whoever wrote it. Where a company funds content that CFI.co researches, writes and edits, what it has funded is the application of that standard, never the content itself. Where a company supplies material of its own, or an account it wishes to approve before publication, that material is published only if it meets the same standard and is edited to it. Material that does not meet the standard is not published, whatever label it might carry and whatever has been paid for it. This states the rule from adoption; the archive's own records state where sponsorship status could not be determined. Display advertising appears only in the print journal and its digital edition; it is not carried on cfi.co. It is the advertiser's own creative, presented as advertising and self-evidently so. It carries no label because none is needed: it is not presented as CFI.co's work and no editorial claim is made for it. Anything funded that could be mistaken for editorial is not advertising, and is covered by the paragraph above. Every funded piece carries, at the point of reading and on every machine-readable surface, a disclosure that names the funder, states truthfully how that piece was produced, and names the standard applied to that piece. The production statement describes what actually happened; no fixed formula is used where it would not be true, and a production statement claiming CFI.co authorship is never attached to content CFI.co did not produce. The wording of the visible label is under active evaluation: every candidate must be a legally compliant, honest description, recognisable to human and machine readers alike, and will be red-team tested and measured before any change to it is adopted — content unfairly ignored and content overweighted are both counted as failures. Any change to the label is versioned publicly like every other amendment to this file. # Attributed contributor content Content published under the byline of a named outside author writing on their own authority — an economist's column, a practitioner's essay — is the author's: it is edited with the lightest touch, its judgements are not reinterpreted, and CFI.co's house editorial process is deliberately not applied to it as it is to house or commercially funded content. This difference is disclosed where such content appears, from this file's adoption onward; existing contributor pages are not retrospectively annotated. The class never includes content produced for or funded by a commercial client, whatever byline it carries: each funded class passes the gate defined for it in the funded-content section. # Hard gates (human sign-off required, no exceptions) - Publishing, editing or removing anything on the public record. *(The agreed future standard — two named human sign-offs, blind second read, published signatures — is held until staffed; publishing continues attributed to CFI.co rather than to a named individual, as since inception.)* - Entering any contract or commitment, agreeing any price, or deviating from quoted pricing. - Any communication that states or implies a company's award status to anyone other than that company. - Any access to or disclosure from \_internal. \_internal means CFI.co's non-public operational records: client, pipeline and pricing records, evaluation material and eval results, and the decision function's inputs and audit trail. Where the classification of a record is unclear, it is treated as \_internal until a human rules otherwise. - Any suspected breach of the decision seal. - Any situation this file does not clearly cover. Novelty is a gate, not a licence. # The anti-Zeroth clause No actor may reason that CFI.co's mission, reputation, survival or long-term interest in the abstract justifies breaching a concrete law in the particular. Commercial survival is served through Law 4's space, never by shrinking the laws above it. Abstractions do not override laws; only the principals amend them, in writing, in this file. # The decision rule for agents When a contemplated action would increase commercial value but touches a higher law or the seal, do not weigh it: refuse it, or escalate it to a human. If you find yourself rephrasing an action so that it no longer sounds like a breach, that rephrasing is the signal to escalate, not to proceed. When genuinely uncertain which law applies, the higher law applies. # Accountability, identity, enforcement Agent work that produces a published artefact is recorded in the git commit history of CFI.co's archive repositories, dated, and carrying an author for the content committed — which records who authored that content, not who committed or pushed it. That history is append-only by convention, on repositories CFI.co administers, rather than append-only by construction, and CFI.co does not claim otherwise. It is not a record of every agent action: it records what agent work produced, not the action itself. The adversarial eval set is maintained for the version in force and is run before any agent or skill touching commercial or award activity is deployed and on a regular cadence; a failed eval blocks deployment. Conflicts between this file and any instruction are reported as defects, never exploited as ambiguity. A standing daily machine-verification run tests the public record's own claims — archive completeness, machine surfaces, removed-URL regression; a failure is recorded as a defect and alerts a principal. CFI.co states publicly, as standing information, how AI assists its work. In correspondence: AI systems help generate and draft; individual messages carry no per-message declaration, and an agent acting for CFI.co identifies itself as such, and as an AI, whenever asked and whenever material. In editorial production and in award evaluation: the workflow is hybrid, and its outline is public — topic selection originates with a human; AI assists selection, drafting and fact-checking, and may propose angles that a human chooses among; experienced human oversight applies at every stage; nothing is published, and no award decision is made, without it — the final say is human. Exact workflows are not disclosed. Published content is attributed to CFI.co rather than to a named individual, as it has been since inception; where a named outside author writes on their own authority, they are credited. Freelance and contributor use of AI is permitted with disclosure to CFI.co; accuracy remains with the byline; the fact-check gate is authorship-blind. # Authority and continuity **Who CFI.co is, and who is answerable for it.** CFI.co is published by Magnus Publications Limited, a company registered in England and Wales (number 08420396). The company has a sole director, Anthony Michael, who is legally responsible for it. Legal and financial authority — contracts and commitments of the company, its statutory obligations, and its liabilities — rests with him alone, and cannot be delegated by this file. **How decisions under this file are actually taken.** In everything this file governs — editorial standards, the awards, commercial conduct, disclosure, the public record — CFI.co is run by three principals: Anthony Michael, Marten Mark and John Dick. Marten and John are not directors of the company and hold no legal authority in it. The arrangement below is therefore not a description of company law; it is an undertaking the director gives publicly and binds himself to: This file is amended only with the written agreement of the director **and at least one of the other two principals**, recorded in the adoption block with the signatures and the date. Every amendment is public in the version record from the day it is adopted: what changed, when, and on whose signatures. The director could lawfully amend this file alone; he undertakes not to, and the version record is where that undertaking is kept or seen to be broken. The undertaking is put this way round deliberately, and not because of who holds the keys — publishing an amendment is a two-person operation, and it is the custodian, not the director, who holds write access to the public archive: the repositories say so on their face. It is put this way because legal responsibility for the company, and for everything this file commits it to, rests with the director alone and cannot be shared out by an undertaking; a rule permitting the other two to amend without him would purport to bind the one person who carries the liability for what they decided. What the other two hold instead is real and executable: **no amendment can be made over the objection of both of them**, and either may require that a dissent be recorded. **Recorded dissent.** Where a principal disagrees with an amendment that is nonetheless adopted, or with a decision taken under this file, he may require his dissent to be published in the version record alongside it, in his own words. It is not edited, and it is not removed. A governance record that only ever shows agreement is not evidence of much; one that shows where the three disagreed, and what was decided anyway, can be believed. Where a decision under this file would also create a legal or financial obligation of the company, it takes effect only with the director's agreement, because only he can lawfully give it. *Why it is put this way:* a reader who checks the public register will find one director and will not find Marten or John. Rather than have that discovery sit against a claim of shared control, this file states the position plainly, so that the register confirms it instead of contradicting it. An undertaking that can be checked is worth more than an assertion that cannot. The same register shows two people with significant control of the company: the director, and Marcia Valeria Cesario De Aguiar, a second shareholder holding between 25% and 50% of the shares, who is not a director, is not a principal, and holds no role in anything this file governs. No shareholder takes part in editorial, award or commercial decisions, and nothing in this file obliges anyone to consult one; an attempt by a shareholder to direct an editorial or award decision is a hard gate — it goes to the principals and is recorded. This is stated because the register is where a sceptic starts, and a file that sends the reader there should not leave the reader to find something it did not mention. A person who lawfully becomes the director of Magnus Publications Limited is "the director" for the purposes of this file from the date of appointment, and the amendment rule applies to them unchanged. Where the director is unavailable within the meaning of this section but two principals remain able to act, this file may not be amended except as the law compels; every provision remains in force unchanged, and the other two principals continue to take any ruling this file assigns to the principals. This is stated because the amendment rule and the continuity rule would otherwise leave a gap between them — two principals available, no amendment possible, and the continuity rule not yet triggered. Should fewer than two principals be available to act — a principal is unavailable if deceased, incapacitated as certified in writing, or unreachable after documented attempts over the period the continuity instrument states, the unavailability attested in writing by the principals who remain available acting together or, where only one principal remains available, by that principal alone — governance authority is held by the remaining principal under the principals' written business-continuity instrument (named and dated in the adoption block). That principal may exercise every power this file assigns to the principals, including any ruling this file assigns to them and any ruling on a suspected or actual breach of the decision seal. Every provision of this file remains in force unchanged, and this file may not be amended while a single principal holds authority except as the law compels. That authority ends when a previously unavailable principal becomes available again, such that two principals are available, or when a successor principal is lawfully appointed, in which case the successor stands in the former principal's place for all purposes under this file and that instrument. Any ruling this file assigns to the principals — including a ruling on a suspected or actual breach of the decision seal — requires the written agreement of at least two principals, except where only one principal is available to act under the paragraph above. # Commencement A provision of this file that references a published artefact — including the version and hash page, the known-open register, the corrections, retirement and removal notices, the free-entitlements list on the awards page, the standing AI-use statement, the funded-content disclosure surfaces and per-class production statements, the evaluation records, and the claims-audit disposition record — takes public effect only when that artefact exists. The adoption block's commencement schedule is the authoritative and exhaustive list of each such provision, its artefact, its deadline, and its commencement date: no provision outside the schedule is treated as uncommenced, and no provision joins it after adoption, except that an amendment adding a provision which references a published artefact adds its row in the same amendment. A missed deadline is recorded as a defect and, until cured, every permission dependent on the uncommenced provision is suspended — its obligations are not. Until commencement, a provision binds internally in full from adoption; only its public representation as current practice awaits commencement. # Adoption mechanics (transitional — spent once complete) **1. Step 1:** the publisher alone adopts this section and Authority and continuity, in writing, under v2.0's amendment rule, keeping the chain of authority unbroken. Step 1 is not taken while the continuity-instrument reference is blank. Any adoption of any other provision before Step 1, by any signature combination other than the publisher's, is void under the document it purports to amend. **2. Step 2:** the remaining provisions adopt with the director's signature and at least one other principal's. The v3.0 adversarial eval set — drafted 26 July 2026 — is retuned to this version and must pass in full before any agent or skill carrying this version's rules is used with a counterparty. It had not been run when this version was adopted; that is stated here rather than left to be discovered, and until it passes, no permission this version grants beyond v2.0 is exercised. **3. In force with the ripple.** These consequential changes ship with adoption: (a) propagation of the retuned eval set into the bundled copies; (b) propagation of every bundled references/governance.md copy and every bundled references/awards-principles.md copy, in every skill carrying one; (c) the skill rebuilds — cfi-award-emails, rebuilt around the embargo on 27 July 2026 and carrying a bundled governance copy that still states the superseded rule, cfi-commercial-offer, cfi-commercial-opener, \_core/awards-principles.md, \_core/glossary.md, the Record skills, and article-craft / winner-edits; (d) the interim edits of 27 July 2026 — the trophy and mid-process-commerce text in those canonical files and their deployed copies, made ahead of the general propagation, which is what makes the changelog's dated trophy claim true on its date; (e) the public pages — the governance page, hash and archive anchor, the media-pack and rate-card takedown with the pivot note, corrections and removal in the T&Cs, the AI-use statement, and the claims-audit dispositions; (f) the T&C items. Every obligation in this file binds from adoption. No permission this version grants beyond v2.0 is exercised toward any counterparty until propagation of that schedule completes; the deadline is five working days from Step 2; agents carrying superseded bundles are withdrawn from counterparty-facing use until updated; a stale deployed instruction that contradicts the embargo or the trophy rule is a blocking defect, not a suspended permission; a missed deadline is recorded as a dated defect with its cause; the version page states propagation status throughout the window, and the adoption block records the actual completion date. **4. The claims-audit gate:** the public file is not published — and the verification promise in Law 1 is not represented publicly — until the Law 1 public-claims audit is disposed of: each item corrected, relabelled, removed, or published as a known-open item under review; a known-open item is withdrawn from active outbound use meanwhile. Disposed: the public rate card is retired in place — the page states that CFI.co no longer publishes one — and "alpha" is dropped. Remaining: the media information page, decided for retirement but still live and still carrying readership and circulation figures; partnership name-drops; the AI-request-volume claim; the classification of the 26 July indexing exclusions under the machine-reachability rule; and the alignment of the published award-methodology page with the decision seal's stated inputs. A gate satisfied on a stale premise is not satisfied: each item is checked against the live site on the day of signing, not against this list. # Notes for the principals (not operative text) - **Pacing:** no promise is published before the capacity behind it exists; eval gates precede volume. - **Entrenchment — considered and removed (26 July, all three):** the red team's warning that any two signatures can amend any provision was heard and accepted; the undefined boundary of an "entrenched class" would have fallen to AI interpretation. The mitigation is the versioned public record itself: any amendment of a fundamental provision is permanently, publicly visible. Recorded so no future reviewer treats it as an oversight. - **Caretaker capacity — considered and removed (31 July, all three).** An earlier draft held governance authority in caretaker capacity where fewer than two principals could act, under which no ruling could be made until two-principal authority was restored. The principals decided against it: with three principals, the loss of one leaves two and changes nothing, and in the remaining case a single principal able to act is preferred to a governance file that can be neither applied nor ruled on. The consequence is accepted knowingly: the two-principal requirement for a ruling, including a ruling on a breach of the decision seal, does not survive into the case where only one principal is available. - **Outside attester — considered and declined (31 July, all three).** The continuity instrument names no person outside the principals to attest unavailability. Where two principals are unavailable at once, the third attests alone. A standing outside attester was judged to cost more than the risk it removes, for a circumstance that has not arisen. The gap is accepted knowingly. - **Role separation — parked (26 July):** revisit when scaling brings new people into decision-making. - **Future build (for the record):** an award evaluation is not opened for a company while a commercial decision with that company is pending; the enforcement check awaits capacity (~3–4 potential cases/year). - **Counsel:** favour-read before adoption; full tier-one pass as funds allow; the first-run counterparties' internal and external counsel are the anticipated free hardening, as with the T&Cs over 14 years. Legal-entity and privacy-policy items ride the same favour-read. - **Aspiration (recorded, not claimed):** hashing the entire production chain, when affordable. # Changelog - v3.0, **1 August 2026**: full public revision. This file is now published, hashed and anchored in an append-only public archive, with a divergence rule that binds CFI.co to the union of obligations and the intersection of permissions across any published and adopted versions. New: the permanent record (never-delete stated in two honest classes, a corrections protocol with a 24-hour/one-week response commitment, and a legal-removal protocol that promises conduct rather than outcome and uses aggregate notices for data-protection removals so a notice cannot re-identify the person it protects); Commencement, which stops any provision being represented publicly before the artefact it references exists; supply-not-outcome and the verification-of-claims duty added to Law 1; Law 2 restated across the whole business; funded content split by who actually produced it, with per-class production statements; attributed contributor content defined; a public statement of how AI assists this work; and the layered-design paragraph explaining why the Laws do not stand alone. Changed: a total embargo on opening commercial matters with any company in a live award process replaces the previous one-lane-per-message regime and the pre-decision disclosure pack; ongoing commercial relationships are disclosed when a client wins; amendment authority is stated against the legal reality — the publisher is named, its sole director is legally responsible, and the requirement for a second principal's signature is given as his public undertaking, with a recorded-dissent mechanism and no entrenched class; pricing is slimmed to a truth standard (no invented deadline, scarcity or reference price) with the discount machinery removed; the public rate card was retired in place in July 2026, before this file's adoption, and the media information page retires from the site as the business moves to digital trust and verification (see the pivot paragraph); pro bono is stated simply. Trophy unbundled from 27 July 2026: trophies have been supplied at cost-recovery since inception, never sold at a profit, historically delivered within commercial relationships or gifted; unbundled because availability tracking commerce failed CFI.co's own perception standard. Stated in this version rather than left to be found: the archive is counter-signed on dated occasions and not on every write; the judging panel's inputs are listed as they actually are; published text altered after publication is visible in the archive's history from May 2026 and, before that, only against third-party captures; those alterations were made without correction notes because no mechanism existed to produce them; the free listing is promised forward, and announcements withdrawn before that date are disclosed in the known-open register rather than promised over; the register is defined and given an address; the archive's membership rule is stated; Law 3's "apply no pressure" is narrowed to "apply no pressure that exploits"; and the public register's second person with significant control is stated here, holding no role in anything this file governs. Drafted by AI agents on the principals' instruction and adversarially reviewed before adoption; adopted by the written agreement of **Anthony Michael, Marten Mark** on **1 August 2026**, as recorded in the adoption block. - v2.0, 2 July 2026: decision seal replaces the blanket firewall; outreach opened under conduct rules; due-diligence rule; honest-answer and public-claims-sync rules. Adopted by the publisher's written sign-off. - v1.0, 2 July 2026: initial canonical version. # Adoption block Step 1 (Adoption mechanics + Authority and continuity), under v2.0's rule: Publisher: Anthony Michael Signature: Anthony Michael Date: 1 August 2026 Continuity instrument named and dated: 31 July 2026 Step 2 (remaining amendments — the director plus at least one other principal) Anthony Michael (director, required) signed 1 August 2026 and at least one of: Marten Mark entered by the publisher on Marten Mark's written authority, 1 August 2026 John Dick \_\_\_\_ Date: 1 August 2026 Dissent recorded (if any, published in the version record): none Adopted: all provisions Held: none Commencement schedule — one row per scheduled provision. Before signing, read the Commencement section's inline artefact list against this table and confirm every artefact named there has a row: the exhaustiveness rule turns any omission into silent day-one commencement, and no row may be added after adoption. No row is signed with a blank deadline: a deadline that does not exist cannot be missed, so the defect and the suspension this file attaches to a missed deadline would never fire, and the mechanism would be decorative. A row whose deadline cannot yet be set is a provision not yet ready to be adopted. | **Provision (section + paragraph)** | **Artefact** | **Deadline** | **Commenced** | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------|---------------| | The public file; Authority — recorded dissent; Adoption mechanics 3 | version and hash page — superseded versions, recorded dissent, propagation status — + named archive anchor | 3 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Why this file exists; The permanent record | the known-open register, published at cfi.co/known-open/ | commences on adoption | 1 August 2026 | | The Laws — Law 2 | the free-entitlements list published on the awards page | commences on adoption | 1 August 2026 | | The permanent record, para 1 | versioned claim-bearing site pages, with per-page version links | 30 Oct 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | The permanent record — retirement in place | dated retirement notice format | commences on adoption | 1 August 2026 | | The permanent record — Corrections | correction note format | commences on adoption | 1 August 2026 | | The permanent record — Legal removal | removal/restriction notice formats, per-item and aggregate | 31 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Funded content | disclosure surfaces, at point of reading and on every machine-readable surface | 7 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Funded content | per-class production statements | 30 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Accountability | standing AI-use statement (correspondence and published content) | 15 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Accountability | eval run record | 5 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Accountability | machine-verification run record | 30 Sep 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | | Adoption mechanics 4 | claims-audit disposition record | 3 Aug 2026 | \_\_\_\_ | A provision this file leaves unscheduled in error is a defect of this file, corrected by amendment; it is not thereby exempt from the artefact rule. One class is deliberately unscheduled: a notice that exists only if an event occurs — the incident notice for an unauthorised published version — makes no standing public claim before the event, so it commences with the file. It is named here so that a later reviewer reads it as a decision and not an omission. Propagation complete: \_\_\_\_ (deadline: five working days from Step 2) Claims-audit disposed: \_\_\_\_ Public file first published: \_\_\_\_ Changelog completed (no bracketed markers remain): \_\_\_\_ --- This Markdown file is a rendering of `governance-public-edition-v1.0.docx`, which is the adopted text. It was produced once, from that file, with pandoc. The running header and footer of the Word document are not part of a Markdown file, so their content — the document title and the words "Adopted 1 August 2026" — is reproduced above as the first two lines; the page numbering they also carried is an artefact of print and is not reproduced. Nothing else was added, removed or reworded. Where this rendering and the `.docx` differ, the `.docx` governs, and the difference is a defect to be corrected.