Defined Claims
The Defined Claim is the common reference point for purchase, evidence, Verification, Challenge, and Settlement. It turns an open-ended assessment of service quality into a transaction-specific question: what did this service promise under these conditions?
Claim structure and quality
A Defined Claim is specific, scoped, measurable, linked to identified evidence, and stable for the transaction.
| Field | Question answered |
|---|---|
| Service | What work will be performed? |
| Accepted inputs | What must the Buyer provide, and in what form? |
| Output | What will the Creator deliver? |
| Success criteria | What conditions constitute delivery? |
| Constraints | Which limits, policies, venues, tools, or data sources apply? |
| Evidence requirements | What evidence will be used to evaluate each criterion? |
| Time boundary | When must execution or delivery occur? |
| Exclusions | Which outcomes are outside the promise? |
| Version | Which fixed claim governs the purchase? |
Claims may contain several criteria, but one Capability Execution resolves against one governing claim. When several criteria apply, the Capability defines how they combine into one Verification Result before purchase.
Illustrative claim
A software security-review Capability could define:
- Private workflow: review playbooks, prompts, model configuration, prioritization rules, and internal tool orchestration;
- Defined Claim: review an identified code revision within the listed directories by the agreed deadline using a specified severity rubric; and
- Delivery Evidence: repository revision and scope, input and output manifests, findings mapped to file locations, required report fields, and delivery timestamp.
The Buyer receives the information required to evaluate the promised review while the Creator’s method remains private. The full example appears in Capability Examples.
Claim boundaries
Accountability follows the criteria written into the claim. Subjective dissatisfaction, market movements, downstream decisions, and failures in Buyer-supplied data fall outside breach determination unless the claim expressly covers them.
Claim validation rejects promises that are too vague to evaluate or too broad to resolve with a reasonable evidence set.
Templates can standardize common claim types by defining required fields, criteria, and evidence patterns.