Retained-State Middleware for Governed Selection: Terminology, Evaluation Boundary and Current CAAI Position

Abstract

Retained-State Middleware for Governed Selection defines a software category concerned with how retained history is allowed to influence selection among actions that a host system has already declared permissible. The central principle is: retained history is eligible evidence, not automatic authority. This technical note defines retained-state middleware, Retained-State Selection, governed selection, retained-state influence, reference and governed conditions, Decision Records and historical-truth constraints. It also records the current public engineering position of Collapse Aware AI™ (CAAI), developed by Inappropriate Media Limited. Core Gold is the frozen current commercial selector foundation. Evolution 2 is the richer continuity Engineering branch and is not represented as the finished Production commercial offer. Weighted Emergence Layering (WEL) and Active Information Weight (AIW) remain active concepts within the wider CAAI retained-state architecture, while private scoring implementation, thresholds, tuning and protected runtime mechanics remain proprietary. The commercial evaluation problem is deliberately bounded: a host supplies a real or anonymised decision problem, a permitted candidate set and relevant retained history. Reference and governed conditions can then be compared to determine whether retained history materially changes which permitted candidate wins, with replayable and inspectable evidence where supported by the tested system. This document is a terminology, evaluation and claim-boundary record. It is not an implementation specification, source-code disclosure, production API contract, claim of universal efficacy or evidence for a physical law. Collapse Aware AI™ can be evaluated independently as software through Retained-State Decision Audits, bounded Core Gold evaluations, buyer-specific pilots and integration work. Commercial enquiries: collapseawareai@gmail.com