Authoritative Intent. The declared target state a system is allowed to recover, reconcile, rebuild, or enforce toward.
Authoritative intent is not the same as observed state. It may come from a source of record, lockfile, manifest, approved decision, policy rule, or durable work record. Recovery becomes deterministic when it compares actual state to authoritative intent, computes the difference, and applies governed corrections instead of reconstructing intent from logs, memory, or whatever state survived the failure.