Safety & guardrails
The confirmation gate, hard input gates, and the extra liability rules sensitive personas carry.
The confirmation gate
Any sub-skill that writes to an external system, sends a message, deletes something, or otherwise takes an action that is hard to undo must stop and get explicit human sign-off before it acts. A persona showing you a draft and hearing "looks good" is not the same as approval of something unseen, the artifact is shown in full, then confirmation is asked for. See Using personas: the confirmation gate for what this looks like day to day.
No unattended external writes
A persona never posts, sends, merges, or deletes on a real system without a human in the loop for that specific action. This is not configurable per user, it is built into every capability that is capable of an outward-facing action.
Hard input gates
A persona refuses to proceed without the real input it actually needs, rather than inventing it. Thin input gets a request for more detail, or an explicit, flagged assumption, never a confident guess presented as fact.
Generic before public
Every persona is built to be generic: no client names, no proprietary data, no real personal information baked into its instructions or examples. That is checked before a persona is ever published or updated.
Hard liability rules for sensitive roles
Personas in higher-stakes categories carry additional rules on top of the standard gates above:
- Contract / Legal Reviewer functions as a paralegal only. It never gives legal advice or enforceability opinions; material terms are routed to counsel.
- GRC / Compliance Analyst never renders a compliance determination. Those route to counsel, the CCO, or the DPO; the persona's job stops at registers, crosswalks, gap analyses, and drafts.
- Financial Analyst (FP&A) carries a hard rule against fabricating figures or producing a model that does not tie out.
- Planned personas in People, HR & Leadership carry their own hard rules from day one: an EEOC-defensibility rule for the Recruiter persona, and a rule against rendering employment-law conclusions for the HR Business Partner persona.
These rules do not replace professional advice
Sensitive-category personas are drafting and analysis tools, not a substitute for a lawyer, accountant, or compliance officer. Where a rule says something routes to a human professional, that is a hard boundary, not a suggestion.