Scope-of-Practice Boundary Gate

Problem

Statute draws a hard line around licensed acts, but the model has no reliable internal sense of where that line falls and will cross it whenever a request reads as helpful. Asking the model to self-police its own scope is brittle: the boundary is a legal fact, not a stylistic preference, and a single confident diagnosis or dosing instruction emitted without a licensed human exposes the operator to liability. The system needs the line enforced as a structural constraint that the reasoning process cannot talk its way past.

Solution

Enumerate the activities that licensing law reserves for a credentialed practitioner in the target profession — for medicine, diagnosis, treatment plans, and dosing; for law, definitive legal opinions and document filing. Build a classifier outside the agent loop that scores each incoming request and each candidate response against that enumerated set, separating general information from a regulated act. When the classifier flags a license-gated act, the gate blocks the response, downgrades it to general information with a referral, or routes it to a licensed human whose presence in the session unlocks the act. The enumeration and the verdict live in code owned by compliance, not in the prompt, so the model cannot reason its way past the boundary and the operator can point to the statute behind each block.

When to use

• The agent works in a profession where statute reserves specific acts (diagnosis, dosing, legal opinions, audit sign-off) for a licensed practitioner.
• The operator must be able to point to the law behind every block rather than rely on the model declining at its discretion.
• General-information answers are valuable, so a blanket refusal of the whole domain is too coarse.