Is the ARC Bound a universal limit on how fast anything can grow?
No. It scopes to systems whose correction is generated internally: a proposed ceiling on stable self-correctable scaling, not on growth itself. A rocket, an economy or an unstable system can exceed quadratic scaling. The claim is that a self-improving system beyond the boundary loses guaranteed internal self-correction, and the framework predicts drift.
No, and the distinction is the most common misreading of the programme. The ARC Bound is not a speed limit on growth in general. It applies to systems that improve themselves and correct themselves from the inside, and it proposes the boundary at which the best internally generated correction can still keep pace with capability. Beyond it, growth can continue; what fails is the guarantee of stable internal self-correction. That is why the recorded refutation condition is not a bare measurement above 2 but an exponent above 2 sustained without loss of stability: a system that runs supercritical and does not destroy itself would refute the ARC Bound. An earlier transformer-specific derivation grounded a hard ceiling in the O(N squared) attention geometry of one architecture; that derivation is architecture-bound, while the stability reading is both the original December 2024 form and the general one. The one working assumption, that internally accumulated corrections combine like independent measurements, is prepared for registered measurement rather than defended.