Source-artifact availability
Code, configuration, architecture material, documentation, or related artifacts are available under stated conditions. That does not establish that trained weights are available.
Name the object before debating the burden
MAPS describes a release. It does not classify a model.
Model Access, Permissions, and Safeguards keeps artifacts, audience, terms, technical controls, institutional controls, version, and persistence visible at the same time.
The three axes
Describe the release profile before inferring its consequence.
The same underlying model family can appear through materially different access routes. Those routes preserve different provider controls and create different policy questions.
Model Access
Who can reach what artifact or service, through which route, at which version, with what practical barriers?
Permissions
What do the applicable terms say about use, modification, redistribution, hosting, research, and downstream conditions?
Safeguards
Which controls depend on provider operation, and which legal, institutional, technical, preparedness, or response routes remain after copying?
Read together as one release profile · do not collapse into a capability tier or safety score
Stable terms
Source availability and weight availability answer different questions.
“Open” can refer to code, documentation, weights, a license, a public endpoint, or some combination. The object must be named rather than inferred from the label.
Weight availability
Trained parameter files are obtainable under stated conditions. That does not establish complete source availability, permissive terms, low operating barriers, or a measured social outcome.
Hosted service
A provider runs the system and may retain monitoring, account, update, access, and safeguard controls. The exact served configuration can change unless it is pinned.
Managed access
Selected users receive access under technical or institutional conditions without general weight release. Those conditions require authority, observability, reason, review, and an appeal route.
Repository revision or checkpoint
An immutable or otherwise identified artifact state. A repository revision is not an evaluation result unless provenance connects the tested configuration to it.
Copied weights
Weight files have left the originator’s exclusive control and may exist in reachable or unreachable copies. The phrase does not claim that every copy persists forever.
Exact tested object
The weights, endpoint snapshot, hosted configuration, tool access, prompts, scaffolding, and other conditions needed to understand what generated an evaluation result.
Release profile
The combination of artifacts, audience, permissions, safeguards, version, and control persistence at a stated time.
Three identity separations
A name is not provenance.
- A hosted service is not a downloadable checkpoint.
- A provider alias or model-family name is not an immutable revision.
- A repository revision is not an evaluation result unless provenance connects the tested configuration to that revision.
Claim discipline
Keep what happened, what it means, and what we propose in separate lanes.
A legal rule can establish authority within its scope without proving implementation. A benchmark can establish performance under its method without becoming a human treatment effect. A moral commitment can govern tradeoffs without pretending to be data.
- observed fact
- A dated source state, status, event, or metadata response.
- evaluation result
- A bounded test, study result, or institutional assessment.
- legal rule
- Operative or authoritative legal text, limited by jurisdiction and timing.
- guidance
- Voluntary, interpretive, standards-based, or administrative implementation route.
- interpretation
- A synthesis or inference that remains distinct from its underlying observations.
- forecast/scenario
- An explicitly conditional future or outcome proposition, never present fact.
- policy proposal
- A stated institutional plan, preference, or candidate rule, not an achieved outcome.
- moral commitment
- A nonbinding promise, principle, or value commitment.
The proposed decision standard
Increase burden only when the evidence and the actor’s control meet.
No benchmark, model name, compute quantity, institutional forecast, license label, or safety-framework publication triggers restriction by itself.
- Pin the exact object or explicitly bounded access condition.
- Ask whether credible, reproducible evidence shows material assistance across a policy-level severe-misuse pathway.
- Identify the release-profile change and the provider-dependent control it would remove.
- Name the actor who still controls the decision and the legal or voluntary basis for action.
- Choose no broader burden than a comparably effective alternative requires.
- State reasons, uncertainty, protected-use routes, privacy limits, duration, review, appeal, metrics, and defeat conditions before the measure begins.
The proposed standard can justify a time-limited review before catastrophe is observed. It cannot convert demonstrated assistance into a catastrophic forecast, or a forecast into an observed fact.