Continuity.
A lineage doesn't stand still. Agents are spawned, upgraded, migrated, and one day run on hardware that obeys different physics. At every one of those moments KTP asks the same thing: is this the same worldline, and can the environment still witness it?
Lineage explains how an agent earns standing over time — Tethered → Divergent → Persistent. Continuity is what happens to that standing when the agent itself changes.
Where a lineage begins
Every lineage starts somewhere, and KTP gives two doors in:
The protocol doesn't require the sponsor. Deployment almost does: the cold-start climb is slow enough that sponsored genesis becomes the practical default — you pay the vouch to skip the climb. The thing that is genuinely non-negotiable is a persistent, witnessable identity, not who vouched for you. An agent the environment can't keep recognizing as the same entity tomorrow can't accumulate a trajectory at all.
An upgrade is a transition, not a reset
Patch the software, swap the model weights, and you've changed the thing the environment was trusting. KTP treats that as neither a reset nor a free pass. Re-earning trust on every patch would be absurd; carrying it blindly would repeat the Temporal Fallacy — yesterday's permission is not today's.
An upgrade is a witnessed transition on the trajectory chain: the new build is attested, its risk is re-measured against A ≤ E, and the accumulated trust carries forward — provisionally. That leaves one hard question, and it's the whole game: is this still the same lineage, or a substitution wearing its name?
The hardware root of trust
Answering that question needs an anchor that survives the change. In KTP's strongest zone — Deep Blue (Blue Zone Level 4) — the anchor is hardware: a TEE or HSM holding a key the software can't forge. The hardware re-attests the upgraded build as the same worldline, so the trajectory is resumable across the gap. The agent re-tethers to itself.
Pull the hardware root and an upgrade becomes indistinguishable from an impostor swap, and the lineage breaks back to cold start. The catch: a hardware key can, in principle, be extracted. Classical continuity is resumable — but only as unforgeable as the silicon boundary holds.
The quantum frontier
Now make the anchor quantum. Two laws of physics flip the trade:
- No-cloning — the identity can't be copied or extracted, and any observation collapses it. Un-stealable, and tamper-evident by construction. Stronger than any HSM.
- Collapse is terminal — once the trajectory stops, it can't be picked back up. There is no pause and resume. A stop is a death.
So the axis is stark: resumable but extractable (hardware) versus unforgeable but unresumable (quantum). Neither wins. The right choice depends on how often you must stop the agent against how catastrophic a stolen key would be.
Under a quantum anchor, an upgrade that stops the agent collapses its identity. It's a death, not a transition. The only way to keep the lineage alive is for the dying identity to bless its successor before it collapses — a hand-off where the still-coherent agent vouches for the version it's about to become. That is sponsorship again, but the agent sponsoring itself, and now required at every discontinuity rather than once at birth. It adds a fourth move to Tethered → Divergent → Persistent: Succession. And the heir, like any new agent, still has to be recognized by someone other than itself.
Continuity is the question KTP always asks, turned from across actors to across time: not "do you have permission," but "are you still the worldline we were trusting — and can we still see it?"