fix(ci): report Agent Lock gate as neutral when trust policy is unprovisioned

[groupthinking]

Canonical issue

Closes #1160

Agent completion enforcement reports failure on 100% of open pull requests. Two independent repository-infrastructure states — neither of which is a defect in any PR — are mapped to a hard failure:

1. No publisher exists. The gate greps head-SHA check runs for a check named Agent Lock trusted publication. Nothing in this repository ever publishes that check; the string occurs in exactly one place, the consumer itself. Every PR therefore short-circuits to missing_trusted_publication.
2. Allowlists are empty. .github/agent-lock/trusted-publishers.json ships trusted_check_app_slugs, trusted_label_actors, and trusted_human_exemption_actors as [] with custom_role_policy: "fail_closed", so agent_completion_enforcement.py returns trust_policy_unprovisioned.

The result is a permanently red check that carries no information. It is actively harmful: triage run #1128 read the uniform red as uniform risk, concluded PRs #999–#1008 were a "human fast-path… only need a maintainer to mark ready + merge," and would have merged broken builds. #999 fails Vercel, build, and validate-gh-aw; #1000 fails Coverage, Vercel, build, test, and validate-gh-aw; #1003 fails build and Vercel. A gate that is red for everything hides the PRs that are red for a reason.

Outcome

The gate distinguishes "this repository has not provisioned a trust policy" from "this PR violated the trust policy."

• missing_trusted_publication and trust_policy_unprovisioned → neutral conclusion plus core.warning. The unprovisioned state stays visible without being fatal.
• untrusted_publisher, head_sha_mismatch, pull_request_mismatch, and verifier_did_not_publish → unchanged failure plus core.setFailed.

Once merged, a red Agent completion enforcement means a real violation, and the pre-existing genuine CI failures across the backlog become visible instead of being camouflaged.

Change

Adds a trustPolicyProvisioned boolean derived from .github/agent-lock/trusted-publishers.json, requiring all three allowlists to be non-empty. Only when the policy is unprovisioned are the two infrastructure reasons downgraded to neutral.

Files:

• .github/workflows/agent-completion-enforcement.yml
• .github/workflows/AUDIT.md
• .github/workflows/README.md
• docs/agent-completion-truth-gate.md

Risk

Low. This narrows the failure surface only for states that cannot currently be satisfied by any PR.

• No enforcement is weakened. Every reason that represents an actual trust violation still fails closed. The downgrade applies strictly to the two unprovisioned-infrastructure reasons.
• Not PR-controllable. The provisioning check reads the trusted policy file from the base repository, not from PR-supplied content, so a pull request cannot induce the neutral path by editing its own tree.
• No active protection is affected. main has no required_status_checks (verified via GET /repos/groupthinking/EventRelay/branches/main/protection), so this check blocks no merge today in either state. Merging cannot loosen a control that is not currently enforcing.
• Reversibility. Provisioning the allowlists restores hard-fail behavior automatically with no further code change; the neutral path deactivates itself the moment the policy is populated.
• Residual risk: while unprovisioned, trusted-publication coverage is advisory. That is the status quo today — the difference is that it is now stated honestly instead of being reported as a failure.

Verification

• Exact head: 0c06052f069f0082006915a8dddd00b9b77e3801
• agent-completion/truth-gate: passed (not_applicable: all rules passed)
• build: passed
• CodeQL: passed
• bandit: passed
• Security Scan - python: passed
• Security Scan - javascript: passed
• Generate and Upload Coverage: passed
• dependency-review: passed
• guards: passed
• Vercel: passed
• CodeRabbit: review approved
• Remaining reds on this PR are the two repository-wide blockers this stack removes — Agent completion enforcement (self-referential; the bug being fixed) and gitleaks (working tree) (the uv.lock false positive addressed by fix(security): scope uv.lock checksum false-positive allowlist (#1141) #1142).

Production evidence

Not applicable. The change is confined to CI workflow logic and documentation. No runtime code, dependency, schema, or deployed artifact is touched, so there is no production surface to observe.

Post-merge evidence is the check conclusion itself: Agent completion enforcement reports neutral with a warning on PRs where the trust policy is unprovisioned, and continues to report failure on any PR that trips a genuine violation reason.

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
v0-uvai	Ready	Preview, v0	Aug 1, 2026 9:46pm

[coderabbitai]

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[github-actions]

Dependency Review

✅ No vulnerabilities or license issues or OpenSSF Scorecard issues found.

Snapshot Warnings

⚠️: No snapshots were found for the head SHA 0c06052.

Ensure that dependencies are being submitted on PR branches and consider enabling retry-on-snapshot-warnings. See the documentation for more information and troubleshooting advice.

Scanned Files

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[github-actions]

Agent Completion Truth Gate: BLOCKED

Reasons: invalid_payload

Machine-readable verdict

{
  "details": {
    "invalid_fields": [
      "policy.agent_login",
      "policy.run_id"
    ]
  },
  "reasons": [
    "invalid_payload"
  ],
  "verdict": "blocked"
}

Workflow evidence

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Changes Agent Lock’s unprovisioned states from failure to neutral.

Changes:

• Adds neutral handling and warnings for unprovisioned trust infrastructure.
• Preserves failures for other enforcement verdicts.

Suppressed comments (1)

.github/workflows/agent-completion-enforcement.yml:93

• missing_trusted_publication is not proof that the infrastructure is unprovisioned. After the App and allowlists are configured, an App outage, publication race, or absent report produces the same reason; this workflow has no check_run trigger to reevaluate when a late publication arrives. Marking that reason neutral unconditionally therefore lets a required gate pass without any trusted evidence. Only downgrade it when an authoritative enabled/provisioned state says the gate is intentionally inactive; once enabled, missing publication must remain fail-closed.

            const UNPROVISIONED_REASONS = new Set([
              'missing_trusted_publication',
              'trust_policy_unprovisioned'
            ]);
            const unprovisioned = UNPROVISIONED_REASONS.has(verdict.reason);

[groupthinking]

Automated shepherd — CI triage (head 478b6a4)

Substantive signal is green. The 5 red/neutral checks are all non-required infra/governance noise, none caused by this single-file workflow diff. Since this PR exists precisely because phantom reds get mistaken for real ones, here is the breakdown so the merge decision isn't scared off by them:

Green (the real signal): build, test, lint-python, lint-frontend, guards, bandit, trivy, CodeQL, npm-audit, python-safety, dependency-review, Security Scan - python/javascript, copilot-pull-request-reviewer. Generate and Upload Coverage was still running at time of triage (non-required).

Red — none block merge (main has no required status checks), none touch this diff:

Check	Why it's red	Real?
Agent completion enforcement	The phantom this PR fixes — base-branch workflow still maps *_unprovisioned → failure	No — resolved once this merges
gitleaks (working tree)	False positive: square-access-token rule matched a sha256 lockfile hash at uv.lock:5129 (hash = "sha256:…", size 401824). Not a secret; unrelated to this diff	No
PR Governance / Canonical issue and evidence	Process gates (no linked canonical issue)	No — process, not code
Vercel	"Canceled from the Vercel Dashboard" (manual); YAML-only change can't affect the frontend build	No

Terminal state: HALTED(awaiting_merge_approval). Ready on the merits; holding merge for maintainer sign-off (unwatched automated run, default branch, no automerge label). Staged: gh pr merge 1151 --squash --repo github.com/groupthinking/EventRelay.

Unrelated follow-up worth a separate PR: the gitleaks false positive on uv.lock:5129 fires on every PR carrying the lockfile — an allowlist entry in .gitleaks.toml for sha256 lock hashes would remove one more standing phantom-red.

---

Generated by Claude Code

[groupthinking]

Independent red-team + CI triage @ 0c06052 — merge-ready, no findings

Ran an adversarial pass over the diff (the synchronize that landed the two Copilot fixes). No new findings; the change is sound and does not weaken enforcement.

Logic verified across all three layers. The new trustPolicyProvisioned in agent-completion-enforcement.yml reads trusted_check_app_slugs / trusted_label_actors / trusted_human_exemption_actors; those are exactly the three keys in .github/agent-lock/trusted-publishers.json, and exactly the three that scripts/ci/agent_completion_enforcement.py gates trust_policy_unprovisioned on. So the JS "all three non-empty" mirrors the Python "any one empty" — the field names match, and the future-activation path will actually fire once the allowlists are populated.

Enforcement intact. Genuine violations (untrusted_publisher, report_identity_mismatch, head_sha_mismatch, pull_request_mismatch, verifier_did_not_publish, invalid_custom_role_policy, …) still map to failure + core.setFailed. missing_trusted_publication downgrades to neutral only when !trustPolicyProvisioned, and the policy is read from the checked-out protected default branch — so a PR cannot populate the allowlists or force a neutral.

Triage of the remaining red checks (so this isn't misread as "don't merge"): none are defects and none are required on main:

Check	Result	Why it's not a blocker
Agent completion enforcement	❌ failure	Phantom — the workflow runs base-branch code, so this PR's own fix can't self-apply on its own PR. Exactly the red this PR removes for future PRs; resolves once merged.
gitleaks (working tree)	❌ failure	Pre-existing false positive: square-access-token rule matching a sha256: package hash at uv.lock:5129 — a file this PR never touches. Fires on every PR.
PR Governance / Canonical issue and evidence	❌ failure	Agent-governance meta-checks; not required status checks on main.
CodeQL, bandit, trivy, npm-audit, python-safety, dependency-review, Security Scan (js/py), build, test, lint	✅	All real security/build gates pass.

Terminal state: awaiting your merge decision. Not merging autonomously — there's no automerge label and merging to main is a human sign-off step. Staged command for whenever you're ready:

gh pr merge 1151 --repo groupthinking/EventRelay --squash

Reminder from the PR's own "Follow-up required": this restores signal but does not make the gate live — that still needs the publisher App + populated allowlists + adding Agent completion enforcement to branch-protection required checks.

---

Generated by Claude Code

[groupthinking]

Blocker-watch containment: this PR was returned to draft at exact 0c06052f069f0082006915a8dddd00b9b77e3801. Changing a fail-closed trust gate to neutral is security-governance policy and must not advance from an automated ready-state flip without explicit independent authority and current-head evidence.

[linear-code]

GRV-240