Mithridatic Self-Administered Immunization Drills

Executive Summary

The name is a reference to Mithridates VI, who reportedly inoculated himself against poison by repeatedly self-administering small doses. AEGIS applies the same logic to its own trust model: on a slow cadence, separate from the fast fault-detection reflex loop, the system deliberately injects a bounded fault into an isolated canary site and checks whether an already-graduated remedy - one that earned autonomous-execution trust under Claim 54 - still actually heals it.

This closes a blind spot that a purely reactive confidence model cannot see: a remedy can go stale silently. The container image it deploys drifts, the API it calls changes its contract, an environment assumption baked into the fix quietly stops holding - and none of that shows up in the confidence score until the remedy is called on for a real incident and fails. The drill surfaces that failure proactively, against a canary, and degrades the stored confidence score the moment it happens, independent of whatever the score would otherwise be from production outcomes.

Problem Statement

A confirmed-outcome confidence model is only as current as its last confirmed outcome. If a fault signature simply stops occurring for a long stretch - because the underlying condition became rare, or because the remedy itself changed the environment enough to suppress it - the associated remedy's confidence score can remain high from stale evidence, even after the fix underneath it has silently broken.

Why Existing Solutions Are Insufficient

• General-purpose chaos engineering (Chaos Monkey/Gremlin-style tools): Injects faults to test system resilience broadly, but is not tied to a specific automated remedy's confidence score, and does not itself feed a Bayesian trust model governing autonomous-execution authority.
• Static integration/regression test suites: Validate a fix at build time against a fixed set of scenarios, but do not continue re-validating an already-deployed, already-trusted remedy against drift that occurs after deployment.
• Passive confidence models (confirmed-outcome-only, no active testing): Accurately reflect confidence based on what has actually happened, but have no way to distinguish "this remedy is still good and just hasn't been needed" from "this remedy silently broke and hasn't been needed yet either" - both look identical without an active probe.
• Manual runbook re-certification processes: Rely on a human remembering to periodically re-test a given fix, at whatever cadence organizational discipline happens to enforce, rather than a system-driven, consistently-applied schedule.

Technical Architecture

Drill Selection

On a cadence deliberately decoupled from the fast reflex detection loop, the drill mechanism selects a remediation signature that has already been admitted to the autonomous execution state under Claim 54's graduation gate. Newly-graduated and long-graduated signatures are both eligible for selection, so trust does not simply accrue and then go unchecked indefinitely.

Bounded Synthetic Fault Injection

A bounded synthetic fault corresponding to the selected remediation's associated fault signature is injected into an isolated canary site - never a production site. "Bounded" means the injected fault is scoped and reversible by construction, so the drill itself cannot become the incident it is trying to prevent.

Execution and Verification

The graduated remediation executes in response to the injected fault, exactly as it would in production. The outcome is independently verified against the canary site's actual post-action state, using the same verification standard applied to real confirmed outcomes.

Confidence Degradation on Failure

If the drill determines the remedy failed to resolve the injected fault, the stored confidence score for that signature is degraded - independent of any outcome observed at a production site during the same period. A sufficiently degraded score can pull the signature out of the autonomous execution state through the same demotion mechanism described in Claim 54.

Drill Cadence & Confidence Decay

Because drill outcomes feed the same confidence store used by Claim 54's graduation gate, a remedy that fails enough drills is demoted through the identical mechanism that would demote it after a confirmed production failure - the drill simply supplies verified failure evidence proactively, rather than waiting for it to arrive during an actual incident.

Prior Art Differentiation

Patent Claim