Share the Taxonomy or Do Not Bother

An agent cannot be AI-native on fourteen definitions of the same person.

Frontier labs move fast on data because they share a language for it. One named world. User, org, event, permission, eval, artefact. Operators and models speak the same nouns. That is not a warehouse product. It is an internal taxonomy the whole company, and its agents, can query against.

If you have watched an enterprise argue for six months about what "active customer" means, you have seen the opposite. The agent will join the wrong grain, cite the wrong fact, and industrialise the disagreement. You will get fluent answers about a world that does not exist.

A contract, not a glossary

Shared taxonomy is not a slide of approved words. It is a contract: this entity, these fields, this grain, this owner, this retention, this jurisdiction. The same instinct as a digital thread. Named objects with owners, not slogans between systems.

Put it in the harness, not in a Confluence page. The model should load it the way it loads a skill. If the skill is how work is done, the taxonomy is how the world is named. Skip it and every tool becomes a private dialect.

The join is the risk

This is also how you stop lying about people. A resequenced ID feels anonymous until two systems disagree about which person it was, or until a timestamp and a postcode put the biography back together. One named world is the precondition for a lawful join, and for refusing one. Without it, the comfort ritual is the only move left, and it does not work.

Graph and vector cannot share an identity they were never given. The ticket queue survived this long because nobody could agree on the noun, so a steward had to bless each question by hand.

Name the world once. Entity, grain, owner, retention, jurisdiction, on the object, loaded like a skill. Then let the team talk to it. Fourteen definitions is not pluralism. It is a machine for confident error.

Related: Anonymised Feels Comfortable. It Is Not., Graph and Vector Are Tools, Not a Religion, and The Ticket Queue Was a Rationing System.