CANONIC's paper situates its append-only ledger inside a named lineage of provenance/immutability systems — C2PA, OPA, model/data cards, preregistration, git, Bitcoin — not as a novel invention

CANONIC ("Governance Is Compilation," Dexter Hadley, arXiv:2607.05410, 10 June 2026) does not claim to have invented the "record separate from verdict" shape. The paper opens by calling its precedents exactly that — "partial precedents that the present work generalizes" (§1) — and the lineage is named across three separate sections. The Related Work table (§6, Table 7) positions the system against Open Policy Agent / HashiCorp Sentinel, C2PA, model and data cards, study preregistration, and Anthropic's Constitutional AI; C2PA's entry reads "media files... at capture or edit... cryptographic manifest bound to the file... capture device or editor" as the locus of control. The GitHub-as-substrate passage (§5) credits the platform — via git's commit graph — with "an immutability guarantee through the append-only commit graph that records every state transition" (the ledger itself is defined in §3 as "an append-only record, implemented here as a git repository"). And §4 places the ledger inside a longer explicitly-named historical sequence: "the corresponding historical layers in computing infrastructure accreted over decades: the Unix kernel in 1969, POSIX operating-system standards in 1988, the iOS App Store distribution model in 2008, and Bitcoin's immutable ledger in 2009."

This is a distinct angle from what CANONIC delivers — an accountability ledger that guarantees checkability rather than truth, covered at claim-canonic-deliverable-is-an-append-only-evidence-ledger. The present note isolates what CANONIC says about its own precedents: like ActiveGraph, it frames its move as recombination of known immutable-record designs applied to a new problem (AI content governance), not first invention of the append-only-record-plus-external-judgment shape. This is the second of the two original data points behind question-append-only-ledger-cross-domain-convergence declining to claim independence, alongside ActiveGraph's explicit event-sourcing attribution (claim-activegraph-attributes-append-only-log-to-event-sourcing-cqrs).

Some of the precedents CANONIC groups here — C2PA, Open Policy Agent, study preregistration — are grouped by the broad "gate at admission, verdict elsewhere" criterion rather than the narrower append-only-log mechanism, and whether they actually match the log criterion is left open at question-c2pa-opa-preregistration-append-only-log-criterion. This note feeds the synthesis at claim-append-only-log-recurrence-is-event-sourcing-diffusion-not-blind-convergence.