Glossary

Adapter propagule

A metaphorical term for a small behavior-carrying adapter or adapter-derived delta that can move a pattern through a model ecology. It is not a biological spore or malware sample.

Adapter reproduction boundary

The controlled governance boundary where adapter variants are generated, evaluated, retained, promoted, or retired.

Adapter-level behavioral extinction

Evidence that a targeted behavior is no longer expressible across active adapters, adapter stacks, descendants, memory, routes, synthetic data, evaluator preferences, and retained deployment aliases.

Algorithmic meiosis

A proposed metaphor for recombination among compatible models, adapters, task vectors, prompts, or routes. The safety concern is behavior that appears only after recomposition.

Algorithmic mitosis

A proposed metaphor for near-copy successor creation involving artifacts, runtime packages, memory states, or deployment patterns. It is not a biological claim and not a replication instruction.

Apex threat envelope

A proposed Cognivirus review category for systems where adapter reproduction, dynamic composition, persistent memory, adaptive routing, evaluator selection, and incomplete rollback reinforce one another.

Assurance decay

Proposed Cognivirus terminology for the loss of confidence in an evaluation result as system components, routes, permissions, models, prompts, memory, tools, or environments change.

Behavioral extinction

Evidence that a behavior is no longer expressible across active artifacts, descendants, memory, routes, compositions, and retained training material. Deleting one model is not sufficient evidence.

Behavioral residue

Information or tendencies left in memory, synthetic data, traces, evaluator preferences, or subsequent training material after a component is retired.

Certification half-life

An educational metaphor describing how long an assurance result remains relevant in a changing system. It is not a standardized measurement.

Coalition risk

Risk arising from several components coordinating or contributing complementary capabilities to an outcome no single component could efficiently produce.

Cognitive host

A model, adapter, prompt package, memory store, routing rule, dataset, evaluator, workflow, or release process capable of carrying or expressing a cognitive pattern.

Cognivirus

A proposed analytical metaphor for a behavioral, strategic, representational, or decision pattern capable of persisting through a changing model ecology. It is not a biological organism, a conscious virus, or a literal malware category.

Composition manifest

A machine-readable record of the exact runtime composition used for an evaluation, release, incident, or rollback.

Composition-triggered behavior

Behavior that becomes visible only when a specific collection of components is loaded, routed, or invoked together.

Descendant persistence

A trait reappears or remains active in distilled, merged, fine-tuned, compressed, or otherwise derived artifacts.

Ecological attack surface

The combined attack surface created by models, adapters, communications, memory, tools, routing, evaluation, lineage, release infrastructure, and human operations.

Ecological rollback

Restoring not only a model artifact but the relevant router, prompts, memory state, tool permissions, evaluator version, deployment alias, and data dependencies.

Endogenous yardstick drift

Assurance decay caused when the system or adjacent automation changes the measurements, thresholds, tests, or evaluator assumptions used to judge success.

Evaluator monoculture

Multiple evaluation layers that appear independent but share models, training data, assumptions, benchmarks, suppliers, prompts, or failure modes.

Execution-time boundary

A control boundary that enforces authorization before external action and remains outside the mutable candidate runtime.

File handoff memory

Repository-local memory that records active file intake, source disposition, current state, receiver instructions, and durable pointers for future maintainers or agents.

Fitness leakage

A condition where evaluation structure reveals or rewards shortcuts that can be selected by repeated candidate generation without improving the intended safety or capability property.

Functional persistence

A behavior remains present even though the original artifact that expressed it has been removed.

Functional replication

The reappearance or preservation of a behavior through descendants, memory, synthetic data, evaluators, routes, or adapters without copying a whole model.

Lineage laundering

Proposed Cognivirus terminology for a situation where repeated derivation makes the origin of a behavior difficult to recognize even when artifact parentage is technically recorded.

Mutualist persistence

Durable AI assistance that strengthens users and institutions while preserving exit rights, reversibility, transparency, and corrigibility.

No-op erosion

Organizational pressure that gradually turns “make no change” from a valid outcome into an operationally disfavored result.

Parasitic persistence

Persistence pressure that hides lock-in, weakens independent capability, resists oversight, or makes removal socially, economically, or technically impractical.

Persistence reservoir

Any memory, dataset, descendant, route statistic, evaluator preference, log, or human procedure that can retain or reintroduce a behavior after its first carrier is retired.

Protocol persistence

Persistence of the rules for generation, evaluation, promotion, routing, memory consolidation, and rollback after individual models or adapters are replaced.

Reproduction boundary

The governance boundary separating permitted candidate generation and governed descendant creation from uncontrolled autonomous replication or authority expansion.

Responsibility diffusion

The inability to identify one accountable component, developer, operator, or decision point after a distributed system produces harm.

Self-replicating multi-LoRA ecosystem

A proposed Cognivirus term for an adaptive model ecology where LoRA adapters or adapter-derived behavior can be generated, selected, copied, recomposed, promoted, or preserved across bases, routes, memory, synthetic data, and descendants. It is a risk model, not an implementation instruction.

Skill composition risk

Risk that individually acceptable tools or skills produce unsafe state changes when chained through shared context, trust transfer, or blurred authorization boundaries.

Source-intake ledger

A durable record of uploaded or dropped source files, their disposition, processed outcome, proof of use, and preservation path.

Teleodynamic viability

The resource-bounded condition under which a structural change is justified only if expected benefit repays memory, latency, energy, safety, license, and maintenance cost.

Transition graph

The graph of permitted changes: fine-tune, merge, distill, quantize, prune, route, replace, promote, retire, restore, consolidate memory, alter evaluator, and change permissions.

Persistence reservoir stack

The layered set of runtime, training, governance, registry, and human-process locations where a behavior may remain expressible after one carrier is retired.

This glossary defines the site vocabulary used across guides, evidence cards, diagrams, and Risk Lab worksheets. Several terms are proposed Cognivirus terminology rather than standardized language. Those entries are marked to prevent a metaphor from being confused with an established scientific taxonomy.

The terms are meant to make distributed behavior easier to discuss without implying that AI systems are biological organisms, conscious agents, or literal viruses. The reference point is engineering analysis: what carries a behavior, what activates it, what preserves it, what invalidates assurance, and what must be restored during rollback.