Signed in Advance.

Contracted compute is bought in units of hundreds of millions of dollars. Disputes over availability, capacity and degradation are resolved by reconciling provider telemetry against customer logs by hand, over weeks, and no reproducible record is kept of what was decided or on what basis. Recent proposals compile contractual intent into machine-checkable obligations and settle on an automated verification verdict.

We argue that the last step confuses two questions. Verification asks whether a body of evidence supports a claim under a stated standard, and anyone holding the same inputs can recompute the answer. Acceptance asks whether the party the claim binds agrees to be bound, and only that party, or someone it authorized, can answer. A verdict answers the first question and leaves the second open, so a system that settles on the verdict records a result the counterparty is obliged to honor only where it authorized the verifier in advance, an authorization the proposals take once, at the level of policy, and this design records per Case, bounded and revocable.

We present PSYCHE, which settles delivery claims for contracted compute on that separation. PSYCHE compiles a contract into a Contract Profile pinned by digest before delivery, admits evidence through a gate that treats provenance, coverage gaps and inter-party conflict as outcomes in their own right, packages the admitted set into a signed, replayable Proof-of-Reality Capsule, and evaluates the Capsule against the Profile into one of four results, or refuses to evaluate it. The result settles nothing. A Case is accepted only on a review signed by the party it binds, or by a delegate inside a grant that party issued. What the counterparty’s silence costs is signed in advance: when the Case is armed, both parties sign the review window and the expiry form, selected from an enumerated set, under which the Case expires if the window closes without a decision.

We model the system as a fold over an append-only signed log kept by an untrusted host. Acceptance soundness states that every accepted Case names the review that settled it, signed by the counterparty or by its delegate inside a valid grant. Every state a Case reaches through silence is expired, under a form the silent party signed in advance, and no quantity of silence produces acceptance. Supporting properties cover order invariance, terminal monotonicity, equivocation detectability and temporal binding. We describe an implementation of the contract-to-archive pipeline and evaluate it on a synthetic corpus of 1,760 Cases: replay from the bundle alone, invariant enforcement under adversarial logs, four-valued against two-valued verification, silence under settlement terms, and a worked partial-delivery dispute.