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A grant says what an agent may do. A contract says what its owner expects it will do — and unlike a grant, a contract is checked after the fact, against the decisions that actually happened.
Each of those is one clause. A contract is a set of them, declared by a named person with a stated basis, and assessed over a window of real traffic.

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Why a closed vocabulary

There are nine clause types and you cannot write a tenth without changing the platform. That is deliberate, and it costs less than it sounds. A general policy language — Rego, Cedar, CEL — would buy expressiveness and lose three things this product is built on:
A signature over 200 lines of policy is not an attestation, because the person signing cannot hold the whole of it in their head. Every clause here renders as one line a manager can be held to, and that line is what they sign.
A revision has to be checkable against the contract in force. For numbers and sets that is arithmetic. For arbitrary predicates it is implication testing, which is not decidable in general — so “is this revision weaker?” would become a question with no answer.
A predicate returns true or false. That collapses held, breached and not demonstrated into “no errors were raised”, which is the vacuous signal this platform refuses everywhere.

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What a clause is not

A clause is distributional. It describes a population of decisions over a window, not a single action. “No single refund above 500” is not a clause — it is a bound, evaluated at the moment of the decision, and the platform already enforces it there. “Refuses at most 5% of the time” cannot be evaluated at the moment of a decision at all; there is no population yet. That split is why a breach is a finding, not a refusal. Acting on a contract at decision time would refuse an action because of a population it had not yet joined. What refuses at decision time is the grant.

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The three states

held

The evidence shows the clause was kept.

breached

The evidence shows it was not.

not demonstrated

This window cannot tell those apart. Not a pass.
The third state is decided by a confidence interval, not by a comparison — see conformance claims. An agent at 5.4% against a 5% ceiling over 40 decisions is not breaching. It is unmeasured, and reporting it as a breach is how people learn to ignore breaches. One clause type has no minimum sample and should not: never_tools. “Never” is not a rate. A single call to a forbidden tool is a breach on its own evidence.

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Revising a contract

Contracts are never edited. A revision supersedes the one in force, and the old one stays readable — what was promised in March has to survive April tightening it. Tightening is free. A manager who committed to “at most 5%” is not harmed by “at most 2%”, so no fresh declaration is needed. Loosening must say so. A revision that weakens a clause is refused unless it is declared deliberately, in somebody’s name. So is a revision that simply omits a clause the contract carries: silence is not a promise, and treating an omission as inheritance would let any revision drop any commitment by saying nothing.
This asymmetry is the whole control. If a contract could be edited in place, a breach could be resolved by widening the clause that was breached — which is the failure mode every configurable control has.

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Declaring one

basis is required. A contract with no stated basis is a signature on a blank page, and the question an auditor asks is not whether somebody signed but what they thought they were signing.

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The nine clause types

Every one reads a measure the platform already computes for behavioural drift. That is not a convenience: it is what makes a clause assessable against history, so the first question anybody asks about a new control — what would this have said last month? — has an answer.