Determine that a pilot has become a production system

In plain terms

Decide the pilot has crossed into production and now requires classification. Without this decision, pilot status functions as a governance exemption nobody granted.

What is being judged

Whether any of the four transition triggers at Layer 4 §5A has been met. It serves users outside the team that built it. Its output influences a decision that is acted upon. It processes production data containing personal or regulated information. It has operated beyond the duration stated in its pilot registration.

Any one is sufficient, and the fourth is what makes the others enforceable. A pilot registered with no end date is a production system that has not been classified, and the pilot register exists to make that condition visible.

The judgment is deliberately mechanical. This is not a question of whether the system feels finished. Systems described as pilots run for years against production data with real users, and the word is doing the work of an exemption.

What this decision does not cover

It does not classify the system, which is L4-CLS-04 or L4-CLS-05 and follows immediately. It does not authorize production use, which the system may already be doing in fact.

When it fires

On event. On any of the four triggers. At the pilot’s registered end date. When a pilot’s user base extends beyond the building team.

On cycle. Pilot register reviewed monthly, which is the sweep that catches drift past an end date.

What you need before deciding

The pilot register entry with its stated end date. Who currently uses the system and what they do with its output. Whether production data is involved and of what classification. How long it has run.

How this goes wrong

Pilot purgatory: eighteen months of production use under pilot status, so classification never triggered, no authorization was sought and no accountable executive was named. The Layer 5 anti-pattern. Registration without an end date: the trigger that makes the others enforceable is simply absent. Transition without classification: the determination is made, the transition record exists and the Layer 4 classification never follows, which converts one gap into a different one.

Related decisions

Threshold Layer 4 §5A pilot transition.

Downstream L4-CLS-03 formal governance determination, L4-CLS-04 or L4-CLS-05 classification, L5-05 production readiness gate.

Metric Layer 5 metric 3, pilots past their stated transition review date.

Instrument references

None. No instrument addresses the state between experiment and production, which is where a large share of ungoverned AI actually runs.