Lantern Warden: Memory Trust Kernel

Lantern Warden

Lantern Warden is a local-first memory trust kernel for Personal AI. It separates evidence, assertions, current beliefs, historical state, and action authority so a long-lived AI can remember without quietly turning remembered information into permission.

The project is built around three questions:

Why do you believe this? Lantern traces a current belief back through Claims, Episodes, and exact Source evidence. Is it still true? Lantern preserves superseded history, corrections, stale-state invalidation, and candidate-only state-change reasoning. Is this information allowed to make you act? Action authority is kept structurally separate from epistemic belief. External evidence, summaries, model output, and repeated memories cannot manufacture an AuthorityGrant.

For this hackathon, Lantern Warden is being significantly extended from the pre-existing Lantern Keeper epistemic-memory foundation into a Personal AI trust system. The hackathon-era work includes an independent typed authority domain, deterministic capability/scope/version/expiry/revocation checks, CSRF-protected authority control-plane work, durable execution receipts, Tethers enforcement, NVIDIA OpenShell sandbox enforcement, a Nebius/NVIDIA Nemotron Dreamer adapter, a Tavily external-evidence lane, and adversarial poisoning/non-amplification tests.

The security claim is deliberately narrow: Lantern Warden does not claim that an LLM cannot be manipulated. It is designed so that a manipulated reasoning model still does not automatically acquire operational authority.

The intended competition track is Personal AI. Nebius Token Factory and NVIDIA Nemotron provide bounded semantic reasoning; Tavily supplies explicitly external live-world evidence; Lantern Warden maintains evidence, state, and authority provenance; deterministic Tethers policy and OpenShell runtime enforcement sit downstream of reasoning.

The underlying repository remains lantern-keeper for continuity with the original project history, while Lantern Warden is the distinct hackathon product name. Public repository and reproducible setup instructions are being maintained throughout the build. Final live demo, video, sponsor feedback, and benchmark results will be added before submission.

Built With

• nebius-token-factory
• nvidia-nemotron
• nvidia-openshell
• rust
• surrealdb
• surrealkv
• tavily
• tethers