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Forge maintains one durable identity and an immutable revision history for each policy.

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Revisions

Creating a policy starts its revision stream. Every successful update:
  1. validates the complete family definition;
  2. checks the caller’s expected current revision;
  3. writes a new immutable revision;
  4. makes that revision current.
The expected-revision check prevents one writer from silently overwriting another. Policy hits, violations, approval grants, and audit records retain the policy ID and exact revision used for their decision. Restoring an older definition does not make history mutable. Forge copies the selected historical definition into a new forward revision.
In this example, revision 5 becomes the definition for a new revision after Forge confirms that revision 8 is still current.

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Enabled state

enabled: false excludes the current revision from new evaluations while preserving:
  • the policy identity;
  • all prior revisions;
  • historical hits and violations;
  • approval and audit history;
  • management ownership.
Disabling a policy is therefore different from deleting it.

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Ownership

Terraform ownership records managementMode = "terraform" with the bound manager, instance, and principal. Importing an existing Forge-managed policy requires an explicit revision-bound authority claim. Emergency break-glass detachment creates a new Forge-managed revision and records the required incident reason in the audit trail. The previous Terraform manager immediately loses write authority. MCP Registry access rules are stored and evaluated as Content policies but must be edited from Registry. An organization-authored Content policy may also target the same MCP server or tool; normal action precedence applies when both match.

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Backtests

Backtests evaluate an authored Content or Access policy against compatible historical evidence without changing the deployed policy. A backtest captures:
  • the authored definition;
  • the compiled policy snapshot;
  • policy source and version;
  • requested and effective mode;
  • filters and historical target;
  • estimated and scanned event counts;
  • decisions, hits, diagnostics, and completion status.
Content backtests can filter by time, user, group-expanded user, device, session, tool, model, integration, and observation kind. Access backtests support time, user, group-expanded user, device, and observation-kind filters. A candidate event is compatible historical evidence Forge could replay. It is not a partial match. The policy still must satisfy its scope and complete condition tree, and its exception must not match. A completed backtest can therefore contain candidate events and zero hits.

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Deletion

Deletion tombstones the policy instead of erasing it. The policy stops participating in new evaluation, but its revisions and historical references remain available for audit. Tombstoned policy IDs cannot be reused. Terraform destroy follows the same history-preserving model for a Terraform-owned policy.

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Audit history

Lifecycle operations record the actor, policy ID, revision, management mode, and operation context. This includes creation, update, restoration, ownership changes, break-glass detachment, enablement changes, and deletion.