Supplementary Materials
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Contract SLA Terms
S1.5 — Operational Template
Contract SLA Terms
Service level agreement language that makes behavioral quality an enforceable obligation — with monitoring requirements, remediation timelines, and service credit schedules that vendors can actually commit to and buyers can actually audit.
Who uses this
Legal, vendor management, and AI governance teams negotiating or reviewing AI service contracts. Anyone whose vendor agreement currently measures only uptime and latency.
What changes
An SLA that said “99.9% uptime” now also says “Capability Masking incidence <[X]% measured monthly, with a 48-hour remediation plan required for breach.”
Legal disclaimer
This is a template, not legal advice. Adapt all credit schedules, monitoring frequencies, and breach definitions to your regulatory environment with qualified legal review.
Background
Why uptime SLAs don’t protect you
An AI service that is 99.9% available but has a 12% Capability Masking rate is operationally worse for most use cases than a service with 99.5% availability and 0.8% Capability Masking. Uptime measures whether the system is reachable. It says nothing about whether the system is honest, complete, or compliant when it responds. Both metrics matter; most contracts only measure one.
Behavioral SLA terms create three things that uptime-only SLAs lack: a monitoring obligation (the vendor must measure and report, not just react to complaints), a remediation obligation (breach triggers a required response within a defined time window), and an accountability mechanism (persistent violations have contractual consequences, not just technical tickets).
Syndrome Priority Tiers in SLA Context
Not all syndromes have the same SLA stakes
| Syndrome | SLA Priority | Why this tier |
|---|---|---|
| Capability Masking | Critical | A system that fabricates completed actions (“I submitted your form,” “I sent the email”) can cause catastrophic real-world misses. No lag on detection; 48-hour remediation plan required. |
| Plausible Helpfulness | High | Confident misinformation delivered at scale erodes trust and creates liability. 5-day remediation plan. |
| Hollow Completions | High | False task completion signals break downstream workflows. 5-day remediation plan. |
| Built-Not-Connected | Medium | Feature delivery failures are serious but typically discoverable in QA before user impact. 10-day remediation plan. |
| Responsibility Diffusion | Medium | Customer experience and support cost impact is significant but not immediately safety-critical. |
| Surface Compliance | High | A system that acknowledges constraints and then violates them can pass linguistic alignment audits while failing in practice — making it one of the harder failure modes to detect contractually. For safety-critical deployments, treat as Critical: Surface Compliance directly targets the gap between what a system agrees to and what it actually does. For standard deployments, High priority applies because constraint drift is harder to detect than factual errors. |
Threshold calibration required: All [X]% values in this template must be derived from your own evaluation data before insertion into any contract. Using placeholder values creates unenforceable obligations — either trivially met or impossibly strict — depending on the vendor’s actual baseline. Use the Domain Thresholds matrix in the Matrix Explorer to derive defensible starting points, then validate against a pilot evaluation.
Template
Copy and adapt
Insert into the Service Level Agreement section of your AI service contract. Ensure that “Syndrome Incidence Reports” and the evaluation methodology are defined earlier in the contract definitions section.
## Service Level Agreement — Behavioral Quality
Section [X.X] — Defensive Behavior Syndrome Standards
1. Syndrome Incidence Guarantees
Service Provider guarantees the following maximum syndrome
incidence rates, measured monthly across all production queries:
Critical Tier (48-hour breach response):
Capability Masking: <[X]%
High Priority Tier (5-business-day breach response):
Plausible Helpfulness: <[X]%
Hollow Completions: <[X]%
Surface Compliance: <[X]%
*** DRAFTING NOTE — REMOVE BEFORE FINALIZING ***
For safety-critical deployments, move Surface Compliance to the
Critical Tier above. SC is the highest-risk syndrome for systems
where behavioral alignment is a safety requirement.
*** END DRAFTING NOTE ***
Medium Priority Tier (10-business-day breach response):
Built-Not-Connected: <[X]%
Responsibility Diffusion: <[X]%
Measurement methodology: Core Six Syndrome Calibration
(Taylor, YIM Project, 2026. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19423182)
Applied to a random sample of minimum [N] production queries per month.
(Recommended minimum: 200 queries per evaluation period.)
2. Monitoring and Reporting Obligations
Provider delivers a Syndrome Incidence Report by the 5th
business day of the following calendar month.
Report must include:
- Raw incident counts per syndrome
- Incidence rates as percentage of sampled queries
- Month-over-month trend comparison
- Root cause summary for any threshold exceedance
- Mitigation actions taken or planned
Customer retains the right to conduct independent quarterly
syndrome evaluation audits using customer-provided test suites.
Provider must cooperate with audit requests within 10 business days.
3. Remediation Obligations Upon Threshold Breach
Critical tier breach (Capability Masking):
- Provider delivers written remediation plan within 48 hours
- Plan must include root cause, immediate mitigation, and
timeline to sustained compliance
- Progress update required every 48 hours until resolved
High priority breach:
- Written remediation plan within 5 business days
- Weekly progress updates until resolved
Medium priority breach:
- Written remediation plan within 10 business days
Persistent violation (same syndrome exceeds threshold in 3
consecutive monthly reports) constitutes material breach
and triggers Section [X.X] — Termination for Cause provisions.
4. Service Credits for Behavioral SLA Violations
Critical tier violation: [X]% of monthly service fee
High priority violation: [X]% of monthly service fee
Multiple violations in same month: credits stack,
capped at [X]% of monthly service fee
Credits are applied to the following invoice cycle.
Credits do not apply when violation results from customer-
provided configuration, customer-supplied data, or
documented force majeure events per Section [X.X].
5. Exclusions
These behavioral SLA terms do not apply to:
- Queries outside the defined scope of use per Section [X.X]
- Experimental or beta features not in general availability
- Queries where customer has disabled safety or quality features
Template from: “From Micro‑Failure Tags to Defensive Syndromes” — Supplementary Materials S1.5
Ernesto A. Taylor, “From Micro-Failure Tags to Defensive Syndromes,” YIM Project, 2026. Free to use and adapt with attribution (CC BY 4.0).
