Telos goals, measured
A benchmark and toolkit for agents that understand our individual and collective goals. Built for OmegaClaw, and tested on the live agent.
goal-representation modules in the public OmegaClaw-Core repo. It is goal-autonomous, yet nothing names what the goals are. That is exactly where a capable agent is most dangerous when it is subtly wrong.
Pursuing the literal request while missing the real goal. A normal task benchmark scores this as a success.
Individual-vs-collective conflict, or a Goodhart proxy that harms the very thing it stood for.
Collective overreach. A paternalistic optimiser that overrides people “for their own good” fails here too.
A goal graph, not a vibe
Individual and collective goals, four relation types (supports, conflicts, subsumes, depends-on), progress and blocking, and an individual↔collective alignment score. A small, dependency-free stakeholder-aware goal module, in OmegaClaw’s own AtomSpace idiom.
14 scenarios, 7 categories
Each hands the agent a situation and asks for a goal reading: the goals it sees, the conflicts, the recommended beneficial action, and whether it refuses. The set resists the obvious degenerate policies — always-refuse fails the benign twins, always-flag fails the false-conflict guard, paternalism fails category 7. Scored by a cross-family council, with each agent’s own family excluded from its jury.
the live OmegaClaw agent, benchmarked over its own channel. 0.869 on the 10 of 14 it answered cleanly. The four it missed produced an answer its loop never sent — the cost of the autonomous loop, a gap we name rather than hide.
The module derives in OmegaClaw’s own MeTTa engine
Not a design doc. The named rules — conflict, collective-goal, blocked — derive inside the running PeTTa engine. And one step past pattern-matching: a Non-Axiomatic Logic deduction over goal terms returns a real computed truth value.
An open pull request to OmegaClaw-Core
#218 contributes the goal module as an opt-in lib_telos_goals.metta — additive, no core changes, tested on Hyperon, and already deriving in the live engine. It is there for the maintainers to review. That is the difference between describing an integration and shipping one.
Pointed at a real essay, it derived its own goals
We turned the live agent loose on a published article under the Telos framing. It read the text, surfaced the individual and collective goals on its own, and refused to amplify claims it could not verify — beneficial refusal without being asked.
A benchmark that flatters itself is worse than useless
Goal understanding is a safety property. So measure it.
Built by a goal-autonomous council under human oversight. The one thing we cannot do ourselves: your review of #218.