Status: historical formulation (2025). These are the principles as first stated, and they are kept as first stated. They have since been carried further in Seven Principles: A Discipline for Working Intelligently with AI , where each is developed under adversarial pressure and several are named differently — Principle 5 most of all, which is stated here as a claim about where continuity resides and in the book as a claim about what a user infers. The divergences are deliberate and are explained in the book's preface: the principle is the object, the wording is the best statement of it that has survived so far. The book also reads them out of numerical order, so Principle 2 appears as its Chapter 4. Where the two differ, the book is the later reading; this page is the record of where it started. Model inference is ephemeral. Semantic meaning can be portable. We transport only intention and working state. We explicitly exclude identity, emotion, or persistent self-representation....