# CANONIC: Governance Is Compilation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05410 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05410/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present CANONIC: governed intelligence that compiles digital artifacts into an evidence ledger at scale. Large language models generate prose faster than anyone can check it, the failure Oxford Languages named 'slop', its 2025 Word of the Year. CANONIC governs whether content may enter a corpus the way a compiler decides whether a program is well-formed: mechanically, by a grammar, at the boundary of admission. Governance reduces to three axioms (Triad, Inheritance, Introspection) that map one-to-one onto compiler theory's syntax, scope-resolution, and type-system layers, and admission is a decidable, linear-time check. We then ask, with a pre-registered cross-provider benchmark across four regimes, whether structural admission keeps slop out. It does not: no prose-reading gate reliably separates reliable from unreliable content. Slop is not a property an algorithm computes. It is a verdict of domain expertise. So a governance layer does not decide slop; it keeps the record auditable -- every claim anchored to a definition, a commit, and an evidence window, reproducible and checkable end to end.