Bridging S1–S3 to S5–S6

From posture to concrete counsel moves

S4 is the “why page.” It explains why this pack’s patterns — mitigations, disclaimers, contractual positions, and scenario lanes — look the way they do, given Anthropic’s posture and the doctrines you practice under.

1. Starting assumptions

Non-zero residual risk. Even with RSP/ASL-style safeguards in place, frontier systems retain residual capability and alignment risk. The question is how much and where, not whether it exists.
Shared responsibility. Governance is distributed: Anthropic addresses model-level risks and some system-level behaviours; your client controls use-case design, context, and downstream users; regulators and courts set outer rails.
Doctrinal lag. Product-liability, negligence, data-protection, and platform-responsibility doctrines are being stretched to fit AI systems while AI-specific regimes take shape.

2. Design goals for counsel patterns

Make foreseeable misuse visible and tractable early, so that risks can be addressed in design, governance, and disclaimers rather than only in post-incident litigation.
Align contract language, product UX, and internal controls so they tell the same story about who is responsible for what.
Preserve room for high-upside use-cases while establishing clear “red lines” where deployment should pause unless and until risk is better understood.

Counsel use

When you are explaining your advice to boards, executives, or regulators, S4 is the slide/page you can stand on: “Given the system landscape (S1), the actors (S2), and Anthropic’s posture (S3), these are the patterns that make sense.”

Doctrinal lens

Which doctrines shape these patterns

This segment was designed with several doctrinal “tracks” in mind. We keep them explicit so you can swap in jurisdiction-specific detail.

Product-liability & safety. How courts may treat AI-assisted systems within familiar product-safety frames, especially when AI components meaningfully shape outcomes.
Negligence & foreseeability. What a “reasonable integrator” should anticipate and design against when deploying frontier models in high-stakes settings.
Privacy and autonomy (including penumbral lines). Where deployments implicate intimate or autonomy-related interests that connect back to the penumbral spine.
Platform / intermediary responsibility. How platforms and API providers are expected to manage downstream risk given their visibility and control over usage.

Doctrine drift

These tracks are not static. New legislation, regulator guidance, and cases may change how each doctrine applies. Treat S4 as a structured hypothesis, not a static restatement of law.

RPE watchpoints

Where you rely on S4’s framing in live matters, consider capturing: (a) which doctrines you treated as most salient; and (b) which primary sources (cases, statutes, guidance, RSP sections) you actually checked at the time.

Pattern examples

How the logic shows up in scenarios

These are examples of how S1–S3 logic shapes the patterns in S5 (counsel work) and S6 (acceptance matrix), and how they connect into the Foreseeable Misuse and Penumbral modules.

High-stakes decision support (e.g. clinician support tool).
From S1/S2 we know that regulators and affected people have low tolerance for opaque errors; from S3 we know Anthropic aims to keep catastrophic risks below specified thresholds but does not guarantee zero harmful outputs. That combination drives recommendations for: human-in-the-loop review, conservative UX, strong disclaimers, and audit-friendly logging, typically landing in an amber lane in S6.
Developer-facing APIs.
The lab exposes powerful primitives; customers build many layers on top. S4’s logic pushes toward patterns that (a) clarify responsibility at each layer; (b) restrict certain use-cases outright; and (c) call for downstream acceptability checks. This flows into both S6 and the Foreseeable Misuse pack’s treatment of platform-like scenarios.
Content generation with electoral or intimate impacts.
RSP and Anthropic’s policies commit to mitigating catastrophic and democratic-harm risks, but do not govern every downstream use-case directly. S4’s privacy/autonomy track then points you at the Penumbral module and pushes toward stricter scenario selection and additional assurance work for the customer.

Where to jump next

For concrete work:

Use S5 · Counsel work to walk a specific matter through mapping, alignment, governance, and iteration.
Use S6 · Acceptance matrix to record which lane a scenario landed in and why.
For misuse-heavy questions, open the Foreseeable Misuse pack.
For privacy/autonomy-heavy questions, open the Penumbral spine module.

Interpretive transparency

S4 does not attempt to restate Anthropic policies or any doctrine verbatim. It draws inferences from those materials. When you need language for a filing, contract, or opinion, quote from the primary sources (policy texts, statutes, cases, regulator guidance) and use S4 to explain how you are joining them up.

Traceability

Evidence Ledger claim IDs associated with this segment (S4).

Why Our Recs

From posture to concrete counsel moves

1. Starting assumptions

2. Design goals for counsel patterns

How the logic shows up in scenarios

Traceability