RFC-012: Artifact Lifecycle Protocol (ALP) — 4. Lifecycle States

AIGP Specification › RFC-012: Artifact Lifecycle Protocol (ALP) › 4. Lifecycle States

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4. Lifecycle States

                      DRAFT

                          PROMOTE (agent submits for review)

                      REVIEW

                          PROMOTE (approver approves)

                     APPROVED

                          EXECUTE (orchestrator runs)

                    EXECUTING





           COMPLETED      FAILED



                          ARCHIVE

                     ARCHIVED

4.1 State Definitions

State	Description	Allowed Transitions
`DRAFT`	Artifact created by agent, not yet submitted	`REVIEW`
`REVIEW`	Submitted for approval, pending review	`APPROVED`, `DRAFT` (rejected)
`APPROVED`	Approved for execution, awaiting orchestrator	`EXECUTING`
`EXECUTING`	Currently being executed by the orchestrator	`COMPLETED`, `FAILED`
`COMPLETED`	Execution succeeded	`ARCHIVED`
`FAILED`	Execution failed, compensation MAY be triggered	`ARCHIVED`
`ARCHIVED`	Terminal state, immutable record	None

4.2 State Transition Rules

An artifact in DRAFT MAY only be promoted to REVIEW by the producing agent.
An artifact in REVIEW MAY only be promoted to APPROVED by an authorized approver (see 8).
An artifact in REVIEW MAY be demoted to DRAFT with a rejection reason.
An artifact in APPROVED MAY only transition to EXECUTING via the runbook-service orchestrator.
An artifact in EXECUTING SHALL transition to COMPLETED or FAILED no other transitions are valid.
An artifact in FAILED SHALL trigger compensation evaluation (see 9).
An artifact in COMPLETED or FAILED MAY be archived after a configurable retention period.
An artifact in ARCHIVED MUST NOT be modified. It is an immutable audit record.

4.3 Signing at Transitions

Every state transition MUST produce a new signature entry:

{
  "transition": "DRAFTREVIEW",
  "timestamp": "2026-05-04T10:05:00Z",
  "actor": "agent-remediation-v1",
  "content_hash": "sha256:a1b2c3d4e5f6...",
  "previous_hash": "sha256:0000000000...",
  "signature": "hmac-sha256=e7f8g9h0..."
}

The content_hash is computed over the artifact content at the moment of transition. The previous_hash chains to the prior transition’s content_hash, forming a hash chain. Any break in the chain indicates tampering.

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