Agent Honesty Chain
The Response Contract checks a single reply. This follows the chain across turns and agents.
Maturity: Beta. Every statement on this page was traced to the enforcing code in QuoxCORE on 2026-10-29 (the chain guards, the chat dispatch that calls them and the Honesty Ledger).
| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Checks on an agent's reply that look back through the conversation's evidence: did it do what it promised, did the other agent it names really act, did the other organisation it names really respond. |
| Where it runs | In the collector on your QuoxCORE server, on the chat path that uses stack dispatch, after the Response Contract. |
| When to reach for it | You want replies that do not claim follow-through, or other people's actions, that never happened. |
| How to start | An org admin turns on AGH_CHAIN_ENABLED in Settings, under Governance flags. It defaults off. |
The Agent Response Contract checks a reply against what ran in that turn. The Honesty Chain covers questions that span turns, agents or organisations: "Yesterday you said you'd email the report. Did you?" or "The agent said another agent finished the audit. Did it?"
The checks
| Check | What it does | Maturity |
|---|---|---|
| Promise tracking | Records a promise when an agent makes one ("I'll send the report"). | Beta |
| Promise kept | When a later reply claims the promise was kept, looks for a matching action in the same conversation within the last 7 days. | Beta |
| Claims about another agent | Looks in the conversation's evidence chain, over the last 2 hours or 50 entries, for activity from the agent the reply names. | Beta |
| Claims about another organisation | Checks the named organisation against a list of trusted counterparties your admin maintains, and looks for a matching entry in the chain. It is not yet signature-verified. | Beta |
What happens when a claim is not supported
The chain does not block the reply. It adds a correction in front of it, so the reader sees that Quox could not find evidence. The original sentence is still in the reply. For example:
"I want to correct something I said earlier: I cannot find evidence in the chain that I actually completed what I promised. As promised, I sent the report."
That example shows the shape of a correction; it is not a recorded customer conversation.
A claim about another organisation that cannot be supported is recorded as high severity.
What gets recorded
When a check adds a correction, the chain emits a chain_verification_applied event to the run's VOLT log, with which check acted and a short preview of the reply before and after. Promises are kept in a promise ledger per conversation. The trusted-counterparty list is set up by an admin; there is no dashboard screen for it yet.
The Honesty Ledger
The Honesty Ledger page (/honesty, under Governance) is for admins, and auditors can read it. It shows:
- whether the chain is on for your organisation;
- the checks and their windows;
- recent corrections over 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, with the check and agent;
- a per-agent view, also reachable from an agent's own page;
- a clear empty state when there is nothing to show.
Leaderboard data is also available from GET /api/v1/agh-chain/leaderboard, /leaderboard/:agentId and /leaderboard/:agentId/events, cached for 5 minutes.
Public honesty stats (opt-in)
GET /api/public/honesty-stats returns counts by category only, with no IDs or text. It is off unless the operator sets AGH_CHAIN_FEDERATE_STATS, and returns 503 otherwise. When any count is below 5, noise is added to all of them. This reduces what small numbers reveal; it is not an anonymity guarantee.
Limits
- Only the stack-dispatch chat path, and only when enabled. Streaming chat (which the CLI and terminal use),
/chat/complete, workflows and MCP do not pass through the chain. - Corrections are added, not substituted. The original claim stays in the reply.
- Promise matching recognises a fixed set of action names, so some real actions are not recognised yet.
- Claims about another agent check that the agent was active in the conversation, not that it took the specific action claimed.
- Claims about another organisation are Beta and not yet signature-verified.
Future work (planned, not shipped)
- Signature-verified claims about other organisations.
Related
- Agent Response Contract: the single-turn check this chain extends.
- Agent Honesty: product overview of both.
- VOLT Protocol: the event log both write their trace to.
Last verified 2026-10-29 against QuoxCORE origin/main (chain guards, stack dispatch and the Honesty Ledger).