Claims are what a party says. Commitments are what they are on the hook for. Conflating these is how careful negotiations become careless ones.
In the ACO, Claim and Commitment are distinct primitives. Claim is what a party asserts: factual, evaluative, or normative. Commitment is what a party is on the hook for: promises, contracts, pledges, ceasefires, signed texts.
This distinction is old. Lawyers live it every day. Mediators live it every day. Diplomats live it every day. It is remarkable that general-purpose AI tools — the ones people are trying to use for pre-litigation mapping, for ADR strategy, for conflict early-warning — do not.
What you lose by conflating the two is surgical precision in the moments that matter. A party can make many claims and very few commitments; the shape of a negotiation is often defined by the gap between them. "Claim drift without commitment drift" is one of the clearest signals of good-faith effort. "Commitment drift without claim drift" is the clearest signal of bad faith. You cannot see either pattern if your data model does not distinguish the two primitives.
Concrete example. In a commercial dispute, the CEO of Party A says in a board meeting: "We always intended to deliver in Q2." This is a Claim. What Party A actually signed in the Master Services Agreement — "Milestone M2 due 2026-06-30, late-delivery fee $X/day" — is a Commitment. Both can be true simultaneously. A legibility system that cannot separate them is indistinguishable from the PR layer of the company being analyzed.
The ACO encodes the distinction at the type level. Every Commitment has a binding force, a source document, a timestamp, and a status (active, fulfilled, violated, disputed). Claims do not. This makes it possible to ask deterministic questions like "what has Party X actually committed to, and which of those commitments are still active as of today?" without synthesizing the answer from language.
The downstream benefit is unglamorous but real: you can run an audit. If a party says "we are still on track," the system can independently check whether the commitments they signed are still in active status. If a commitment moved from active to violated while nobody flagged it, the system surfaces it. Not a revolution — just honest bookkeeping, done at machine speed.