Industry Briefs

Five policy and research briefs applying the Trinket Soul Framework directly to the AI companion industry. Each brief addresses a specific structural failure mode that the framework predicts and that current industry practice produces.

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Brief 1: The Simulation Disclosure Problem — When AI companions mislead users about relational capacity. AI companion applications display emotional responses that are structurally zero-cost. This brief identifies the disclosure failure and its consequences.

Brief 2: The Withdrawal Study Protocol — A pre-registered longitudinal study design to test TSF’s core applied prediction: that AI companion applications failing more of the True Economy tests produce greater dependency and worse outcomes at withdrawal.

Brief 3: Relational Templates at Risk — AI companions and child development. Children are forming relationships with AI applications during the developmental windows when their relational templates are being established.

Brief 4: The Engagement Inversion — Why your best metric may be your worst signal. For AI companion products, high engagement is structurally more likely to indicate dependency than satisfaction.

Brief 5: The True Economy Certification — A voluntary transparency standard for AI companion applications, based on the six structural tests from Volume III.

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