Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The embedded-alignment thesis was stated on 8 December 2024. The name Eden Protocol first appears in the 30 April 2025 manuscript. This article separates those two events, because conflating them would misrepresent the record and because the truth gate would catch the conflation before publication anyway.
Four names appear here for the first time. The Eden Protocol, the substrate-level embedding proposal. Caretaker Doping, the compensatory-reward architecture. Meltdown Triggers, the deadman-switch class that the September 2025 hardware paper by Petrie later mirrored independently. And the Babylon and Eden civilisational framing, the fork the Vatican encyclical would independently mirror in May 2026 as Babel and Jerusalem.
Priority on the direction of travel goes to the December 2024 manuscript, whose language names the failure class without naming the fix. Priority on the naming, the framing and the specific hardware and compensation architectures goes to the April 2025 manuscript. When any article on this site cites the Eden Protocol, it does so as "the embedded-alignment thesis (December 2024), later named the Eden Protocol (April 2025 manuscript)." That is the house rule, and it is enforced automatically.
The register lists four external events whose direction the April 2025 framing anticipates. Odeh's runtime ethics gate patents at the US Patent Office, three to nine months after A2. Petrie's Embedded Off-Switches for AI Compute paper, four and a half months after A2. FlexHEG, the ARIA-commissioned tamper-proof guarantee processor work, concurrent with A2. And the Pope Leo XIV encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, thirteen months after A2. None cite A2. None cite each other. Each row lists a primary source and an external date, so anyone can check.
The April 2025 manuscript is a book manuscript, not a peer-reviewed paper. It is a single-author document, self-emailed, and the register does not treat it as evidence of anything by itself: the evidence is the timestamp plus the later external events. The Babylon and Eden framing is language, not mathematics; the register credits it as a framing convergence, not a scientific one. And the naming of the Eden Protocol confers no derivational claim on any other party's product or research; the register avoids that framing everywhere, and the truth gate would block it if it slipped in.
The April 2025 .eml is downloadable. The hash begins 09f5b5e1. Extract the text and search for Babylon, for Eden, for Caretaker Doping, for Meltdown Triggers, for Eden Protocol. Compare counts. Compare page ranges. Compare the framing against the encyclical and the hardware patents. The article is verifiable end to end, or it is not, and the programme prefers the answer to be public either way.
Related notes: what the December 2024 manuscript actually said for the thesis anchor that this manuscript names; Claim 1 explained for the embedded-alignment thesis; Claim 18 explained for the Caretaker Doping component (TRL 0 to 1, hardware framing at the site's published two-sentence ceiling); the full arc for the chronology from A1 to now. New readers: /start-here.html is a one-page orientation to Michael Darius Eastwood and the ARC/Eden research programme.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.