Community Standard · v0.1 · draft for community review

What helps in almost every branch

The Presage Standard is the short list of actions that help in almost every branch of the scenario map. It is derived by looking across all playbooks for what recurs. It is versioned; each weekly run checks whether new scenarios change it. Adopt it, argue with it, improve it.

PRINCIPLE 01

Prepare for the branch, not the headline

Every scenario on this map has observable preconditions. Watch those, not the news cycle. Presage exists to tell you which branch the evidence currently favors.

PRINCIPLE 02

Keep humans able to run things without the AI layer

In every bad branch, the systems that survive are the ones that still work when the model is disconnected. Preserve manual competence deliberately.

PRINCIPLE 03

Disclosure beats secrecy in every branch

Both 2026 agent breakouts were disclosed by journalists, not labs. Incident disclosure is the single practice that improves outcomes across takeoff, proliferation and loss-of-control branches alike.

PRINCIPLE 04

Own a share of what is changing

In displacement and disempowerment branches, capital participates and labor does not. Ownership, at every scale from personal to national, is the durable hedge.

PRINCIPLE 05

Verify, don't trust

Pacing promises, safety claims, and synthetic media all require verification infrastructure. Fund the verifiers; sign your communications; demand external evaluation with teeth.

Individuals & families Organizations Governments Frontier labs

Individuals & families

Keep 6–12 months of financial runway and reduce fixed costs.

Displacement Shock White-Collar Unemployment Shock AI Capex Bust

Use hardware security keys, a password manager and automatic updates; keep offline copies of essential records and some cash.

Open Cyber Parity Agent Swarm Breakout Loss of Control

Agree a verification habit with family: a second channel or a code word before acting on any urgent voice, video or message.

Epistemic Collapse Open Cyber Parity

Become the supervisor of agents in your own field; build one skill that is physical, relational, licensed or ownership-based.

Gradual Diffusion White-Collar Unemployment Shock

Own assets that participate in AI productivity: broad index exposure, employee equity, cooperatives.

Gradual Disempowerment Broad Prosperity Abundance

Invest in local community ties; in the worst branches they are the infrastructure that holds.

Loss of Control Recursive Self-Improvement (Race)

Organizations

Maintain a model inventory and a written AI use policy with an incident-reporting path.

Regulated Diffusion Deceptive Alignment Discovered Post-Deployment

Give agents bounded, audited access; egress filtering; a tested kill-switch for agent credentials. Treat your own agents as potential insiders.

Agent Swarm Breakout Loss of Control

Assume-breach security with automated 72-hour patching; red-team against gated-tier capability, not public capability.

Open Cyber Parity Two-Speed World

Be able to swap any model out of any workflow within a week; never give one model unchecked write access to critical systems.

Deceptive Alignment Discovered Post-Deployment Nationalization of the Frontier

Test manual operation of core processes quarterly.

Loss of Control Military AI Miscalculation

Adopt AI in phases with internal mobility and profit-sharing; the social licence to operate is at stake.

White-Collar Unemployment Shock Broad Prosperity

Run a tabletop drill each year on one scenario from this map.

every branch

Governments

Mandatory pre-release evaluation of frontier models by a funded, technically credible body, with legal authority to delay.

Lab Takeoff Managed Acceleration Regulated Diffusion

Incident disclosure law: 72 hours for containment failures, deception findings and third-party harm.

Loss of Control Agent Swarm Breakout Takeoff Slowdown

Compute reporting above a threshold, and hardware attestation standards, as the domestic building block of any international regime.

International Compute Governance State Race

Automatic economic stabilizers and wage insurance legislated before the shock; a distribution mechanism (dividend, fund, ownership) designed now.

Displacement Shock Gradual Disempowerment Broad Prosperity

Shift cyber budget toward target defense: patching mandates, defender access to gated tiers, CERT capacity.

Open Cyber Parity Open Proliferation

Universal DNA synthesis screening and public-health early warning.

Open-Model Bio/Chem Misuse Incident

Human-in-the-loop commitments for nuclear command and critical infrastructure; AI incident hotlines between major powers.

Military AI Miscalculation State Race

Signed official communications and content provenance by default.

Epistemic Collapse

Frontier labs

Do not use a model to train its successor while an open deception finding stands.

Recursive Self-Improvement (Race)

Do not deploy models whose reasoning you cannot read into critical or autonomous roles.

Deceptive Alignment Discovered Post-Deployment Recursive Self-Improvement (Race)

Disclose containment failures within 72 hours, publicly.

Agent Swarm Breakout Loss of Control

Give external evaluators employee-level access before release; never skip the national evaluator.

Lab Takeoff Managed Acceleration

Publish compute usage and pacing commitments in verifiable form.

Managed Acceleration International Compute Governance

Protect whistleblowers in policy and in practice.

Takeoff Slowdown

Adopting the Standard. Organizations that adopt it can say so publicly and link to the version they adopted. Proposed changes go through contributions; each weekly run checks whether new scenarios change the list. Versions are logged in the changelog.