Terms Preflight
The step before the step. Approval gates, audit trail, rollback and least privilege all presuppose the agent was allowed to act on a vendor in the first place — Terms Preflight checks the vendor terms and sets that right before any production access is granted.
- Capture & pin hash — the vendor terms document is captured and the hash of that exact content (e.g. SHA-256) is pinned, so later checks compare against a fixed, tamper-evident baseline.
- Quote & judge — automation and delegation clauses are quoted verbatim and each is judged allowed, forbidden or silent. Silent is not a pass: it is raised as a FLAG for human review.
- Re-run on change — when the terms change (hash mismatch), the preflight re-runs before access continues; a vendor that has not passed, or whose FLAG is unresolved, does not get production access.
- Why it matters — a scan of 73 vendors returned hostile 26, restrictive 33, unclear 14, friendly 0. Most terms are not permissive by default, so the preflight is run per vendor rather than assumed.