Conversation memory: Requirements and policy

Defines desired behavior, boundaries, failure responses, human controls, and safety requirements for conversation memory. It fixes adoption boundaries and observable failure evidence while keeping environment-specific limits configurable.

Package status: reference context ready for human review. The contract and test scenarios are complete, but no claim is made that an adopting implementation has passed them.

Decision

For Conversation memory, adopt a versioned orchestration policy and an explicit model-call boundary. Make the user-visible promise, exclusions, authority, and failure response explicit while leaving measured thresholds as adoption choices. This requirements block focuses specifically on requirements and policy. This package is a reference contract: the adopting team must choose numeric limits, providers, jurisdictions, and operational owners from evidence in its own environment.

Scope

• The Conversation memory actors, inputs, outputs, states, policy or schema versions, and externally visible outcomes required for the requirements and policy focus of this requirements block.
• Primary and alternate interfaces, background work, caches, integrations, support paths, and evidence that can exercise the same boundary.
• Adoption-specific configuration, rollout, recovery, and verification responsibilities needed to apply the reference safely.

Outside this block

• Choosing a universal vendor, framework, jurisdiction, numeric threshold, retention period, or service-level objective for every adopter.
• Claiming that packaged scenarios have run against a downstream implementation or that this reference grants legal, security, or accessibility certification.

Contract

• Persist the prompt, tool, retrieval, model, and policy versions needed to reproduce or explain each material outcome.
• Validate structured output before any side effect; malformed or incomplete output is an error, not partial authority.
• Separate untrusted user or retrieved content from system policy and label each context item with origin and trust class.
• Bound tokens, tool calls, latency, and spend per request; crossing a bound follows a named fallback instead of continuing unbounded.
• State which actor receives which outcome under each material state, including unavailable, unauthorized, empty, and partial conditions.
• Mark configurable limits and policies as choices with owners; do not present sample values as universal requirements.
• Separate turn context, session summary, user-approved long-term memory, and product records with explicit subject, purpose, provenance, confidence, access scope, retention, and correction authority.
• Retrieve only task-relevant authorized memories, label inference and age, prevent one user or workspace from contaminating another, and propagate edit, forget, export, and deletion through indexes and caches.
• For the requirements and policy variant, enforce this declared boundary: defines desired behavior, boundaries, failure responses, human controls, and safety requirements for conversation memory.

Implementation guidance

• Review the contract with product, implementation, operations, security, and affected users before promoting it beyond review.
• Model Conversation memory inputs, outputs, actors, states, invariants, side effects, and evidence before selecting framework or vendor details.
• Store the applicable Conversation memory contract or policy version with material state so migrations, replay, and support decisions remain attributable.
• Introduce the path behind controlled rollout, compare expected and observed outcomes, and keep a tested recovery route until adoption evidence is complete.

Failure handling and safeguards

• Provider failure, unsafe output, or exhausted budget returns a bounded fallback and retains correlation-safe diagnostic evidence.
• Invalid or contradictory Conversation memory state is rejected or quarantined; the implementation never guesses a value that broadens authority or duplicates an effect.
• Retries are bounded and use durable identity; after exhaustion, work reaches an inspectable terminal state with an accountable owner.

Verification and operations

• Map each promise and exclusion to at least one observable scenario and confirm that no two states require contradictory outcomes.
• Monitor Conversation memory success, denial, validation failure, dependency failure, retry exhaustion, and recovery by contract version without sensitive payload dimensions.
• Re-run paired positive and negative fixtures after policy, schema, dependency, migration, or boundary changes and preserve the resulting evidence.

Adoption assumptions

• Names and values in the example are a concrete fixture, not universal defaults; adopters replace them through documented evidence and ownership.
• The adopting system can provide authenticated identity, durable operation or record versions, bounded telemetry, and a controlled path for change.

The executable-looking examples in this package are fixtures and acceptance contracts. Run the collection validator to check structure and metadata, then translate and execute the scenarios in the target repository before recording implementation evidence.

References

• NIST AI 600-1, Generative AI Profile (applies as of 2026-09-08)