Policy
Independence
AGmind sells a controlled test process, not a favorable outcome. These rules keep payment, client review and engineering work separate from what gets published.
Payment for process, not verdict
A client pays for the agreed test process and its deliverables: the frozen scope, the runs, the evidence bundle and the report. Payment never depends on the verdict, and no engagement carries a guarantee of a positive result.
In independent mode a negative result is a billable, publishable deliverable like any other. Failures stay in the evidence, and the verdict is published under the disclosure terms agreed before the work started. A vendor cannot pay to change a verdict, and cannot withhold payment because the verdict was unfavorable.
Client review is factual-only
Before publication the client receives one factual review round. Its scope is deliberately narrow.
The client can correct:
- an incorrect SKU or version identifier;
- a documented feature that the draft describes incorrectly;
- a factual error in how the client's own position is stated.
The client cannot:
- remove a valid failure from the results;
- change a threshold after seeing the result without a new workload revision;
- require AGmind to hide the funding source;
- replace the verdict with marketing wording.
Engagement modes are labeled
Every public result carries the mode it was produced under. The three modes have different rules and are never mixed on one result.
Independent commissioned test
The client pays for a pre-agreed test. Payment does not depend on the outcome, AGmind is not obliged to fix the product, and the funding source is disclosed on the published result.
Commissioned engineering
AGmind changes the build, flags, patches, quantization, image or deployment. If AGmind writes a patch, modifies an image or tunes a product specifically to reach a result, the work is labeled commissioned engineering — it is never presented as an independent test.
AGmind Reference Configuration
AGmind defines and maintains one specific software configuration for one SKU. A configuration produced by commissioned engineering can afterwards be tested as an AGmind Reference Configuration, but it is never presented as the product's out-of-box state, and the result applies to that configuration only.
Terminology boundary
Published results use a fixed claim vocabulary. Each term has a bounded meaning, and AGmind does not claim more than the term states.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| tested configuration | An exact hardware and software fingerprint that ran under a frozen workload revision. It says nothing about other versions of the same device. |
| qualified configuration | A tested configuration that passed the agreed functional and quality gates for a specific workload and scope. |
| independently reproduced | A claim or prior result that AGmind reproduced from the documented recipe under the same tested conditions. |
| reproduced with limits | Reproduction succeeded only under narrower conditions than originally stated; those limits are listed next to the result. |
| observed operating envelope | The range of conditions under which the configuration met its gates during the runs actually performed — not a statement about conditions outside that range. |
| not reproduced under tested conditions | AGmind attempted reproduction under the documented conditions and the claimed behavior did not occur. The finding is scoped to those conditions. |
| revalidation required after material change | A change to any critical layer — BIOS, kernel, driver, runtime, image or model artifact — invalidates the previous result until it is re-run. |
What AGmind never does
- Sell a positive score or verdict. Intake that asks for a predetermined result is refused.
- Present a tuned, patched or specially configured product as an out-of-box result.
- Issue regulatory compliance conclusions. AGmind can test technical controls — offline installation, egress behavior, secrets and auth handling, backup and restore, update and rollback, logging, SBOM and manifests — but it does not conclude that an organization complies with any regulatory regime. That depends on the full system, its processes and a legal assessment.
- Use certification wording. Until a separate, mature program exists, results use only the bounded vocabulary above, and no regulatory approval or blanket compatibility claims are made.
Per-engagement disclosures are defined on the disclosures page; corrections, superseded and retracted results are governed by the errata policy; the full test rules are described in the methodology.