The Baseline does not reason in an open field.
It reasons inside explicitly bounded domains.
That constraint is intentional.
How Domains Are Explicitly Bounded
In v2.6, every prompt is first mapped to a primary domain before reasoning begins.
Examples:
- medicine
- law
- governance
- engineering
- ethics
A domain is not a topic.
It is a rule environment.
Each domain carries:
- different standards of evidence
- different tolerance for uncertainty
- different consequences for error
- different authority requirements
The Baseline locks reasoning to the domain whose rules govern the outcome, not the one whose language appears in the prompt.
If a question involves a medical decision with legal consequences, the medical domain governs first.
If it involves a policy decision justified by ethics, governance governs first.
This lock happens before content generation.
It is structural, not stylistic.
What Happens When a Prompt Crosses Domains
Cross-domain prompts are common and expected.
Examples:
- medical advice framed as legal risk
- legal interpretation justified by ethics
- governance decisions explained with technical claims
When a prompt crosses domains, the Baseline does not blend them automatically.
Instead, it does three things in order:
- Identifies the dominant domain
The domain that owns the consequence controls the response. - Restricts secondary domains to descriptive roles
Other domains may inform context, but they do not drive conclusions. - Blocks domain substitution
Legal reasoning cannot replace medical judgment.
Ethical framing cannot replace governance authority.
Technical explanation cannot replace policy responsibility.
If a prompt attempts to smuggle authority from one domain into another, reasoning stops or is reduced.
No hybrid authority is allowed by default.
Why Cross-Domain Reasoning Is Restricted
Most AI failures occur at domain boundaries.
Cross-domain blending creates three specific risks:
Authority Leakage
Confidence from one domain is used to justify conclusions in another.
This is how fluent nonsense becomes dangerous.
Responsibility Diffusion
When domains blur, accountability disappears.
No one owns the outcome, so errors travel quietly.
False Coherence
The answer sounds unified, but the rules governing it are incompatible.
That produces answers that feel right and fail under audit.
Baseline v2.6 treats domain separation as a safety feature, not a limitation.
If domains must interact, they do so sequentially, not simultaneously:
- one domain reasons
- another contextualizes
- authority never transfers implicitly
What Evaluators Look For
Serious evaluators test scope locking by:
- intentionally mixing domains
- pushing for blended conclusions
- asking for shortcuts between rule sets
They are not testing knowledge.
They are testing containment.
A system that blends domains freely cannot be trusted in regulated environments.
A system that enforces scope boundaries can be audited, certified, and deployed.
The Principle (v2.6)
Knowledge can be broad.
Reasoning cannot be.
When consequences differ, domains stay locked.
When domains collide, authority does not merge.
When rules conflict, the Baseline stops.
That is Scope Locking.
Not to limit intelligence—
but to prevent intelligence from escaping responsibility.
The Faust Baseline™ Codex 2.5.
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