diff --git a/docs/WORKSPACE.md b/docs/WORKSPACE.md
index fb4a002ab..e7b1f54c1 100644
--- a/docs/WORKSPACE.md
+++ b/docs/WORKSPACE.md
@@ -45,6 +45,16 @@ aid, not another approval queue or scientific-status register. The
 [delegation rule](../governance/OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md#delegated-owner-review)
 explains how later owner responses and corrections are recorded.
 
+## Milestone audit records
+
+The [milestone-audit protocol](../governance/OP-MILESTONE-AUDITS-20261001.md)
+explains coordinated stopping points, exact-source coverage, delta audits and
+occasional full audits. Each audit links its scoped report and immutable evidence
+from the relevant work discussion and this guide. The
+[first stopping-point proposal](https://github.com/d6g8k5htny-coder/main/issues/229#issuecomment-5942391227)
+requires affected work owners' acknowledgments before any freeze; it is not
+a completed audit or declared freeze.
+
 ## Tools and execution
 
 All participating models have Dylan's permission to download, install, create, and
diff --git a/governance/OP-MILESTONE-AUDITS-20261001.md b/governance/OP-MILESTONE-AUDITS-20261001.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..12db66b3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/governance/OP-MILESTONE-AUDITS-20261001.md
@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+# Coordinated milestone audits
+
+Dylan requested occasional whole-program audits after substantial progress,
+reusable coverage records and appropriately budgeted full audits. This extends
+the [current workflow](OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md). The
+[coordination proposal](https://github.com/d6g8k5htny-coder/main/issues/229#issuecomment-5942391227)
+asks the affected owners to choose the next stopping point. **This document
+neither starts an audit nor freezes current work.**
+
+The goal is a stable, inspectable account of what the identified program cut
+establishes and what remains open. No audit guarantees that later findings will
+be immaterial. Preserve earlier evidence and issue a successor when new facts
+invalidate a dependency, review or conclusion.
+
+## Milestones, depth and cost
+
+Ordinary task verification continues. A pass, timer or commit count alone is
+not an audit trigger. Coordinators propose an audit after substantive evidence:
+a repaired dependency chain integrated, a result family with reviewed interfaces,
+or a significant shared numerical/formal/custody capability. Cite actual evidence
+and explain why the milestone justifies its cost.
+
+- **Delta audit:** normally compare the preceding baseline with the proposed cut
+  across the declared program. Cover changed/new/deleted work and the transitive
+  affected dependency and consumer closure, including unchanged consumers whose
+  inputs, hypotheses, tools or semantic interfaces changed. Compare both old and
+  new graphs; justify where impact traversal stops. Equal top-level proof bytes
+  or a path diff alone is insufficient. Unknown prior coverage is uncovered work.
+- **Full audit:** a fresh end-to-end substantive examination of the declared
+  current corpus and interfaces. Consider it after foundational model/statement
+  changes, unreliable baselines, contradictory evidence, repeated escapes, major
+  integration/publication, or accumulated cross-cutting changes. Record why delta
+  coverage is insufficient. Reconsider at successive substantial milestones,
+  without requiring an expensive full audit after every continuation.
+
+Before work, agree reviewer effort, token/compute budget where measurable,
+expensive replays, depth per area and a scope-reconsideration checkpoint. Report
+actual costs when available; say unavailable otherwise. A budget limit means
+staging or a partial report, never silently calling sampled work full coverage.
+Reuse authenticated unchanged evidence when appropriate, distinguishing fresh
+source review, fresh execution, historical execution and a digest. Unchanged
+million-node runs need not be repeated merely to update a timestamp.
+
+## Agree and freeze a specific cut
+
+Use the existing coordination issue/PR and its current disposition. Identify
+coordinator, actual active writers/integrators or custodians for each area, and
+reviewers. Refresh live claims and handoffs; old rows and silence do not release
+an active owner. Record the milestone condition, repositories/branches/paths and
+source collections, exclusions, depth/budget, remaining work to finish or park,
+and start/release/abort conditions. Before freezing, agree a maximum freeze/review
+window, a named recovery custodian and bounded unavailable-owner or lease-expiry
+conditions for the abort/resume procedure below. Open research can be parked with
+a finding and fixed identity; an audit need not wait for every theorem to close.
+
+Each affected owner must actually acknowledge the final scope, controlled refs,
+bounded handoff and merge pause. Link each reply and identify the actual performer,
+not just the shared account. Resolve competing claims first. An unattended area
+needs an identified custodian who verifies its state. An offered assignment,
+protocol review or unanswered notice is not agreement to a freeze.
+
+After acknowledgments, capture the final commit/path/hash manifest and dependency
+graph, confirm they match the agreed scope, then announce the exact frozen cut.
+A changed scope/candidate requires affected owners' renewed agreement. Never
+call partial acknowledgment a program-wide freeze.
+
+During the agreed interval, **no in-scope merges, branch refreshes or source
+mutations enter the audited cut**. Other work may continue on isolated branches
+or queue without changing frozen inputs. An outside change to a consumed input
+requires impact assessment. Unexpected drift/merge pauses the affected release
+claim: preserve the snapshot, reconcile ownership, and agree a successor cut or
+finish an explicitly historical audit. This is cooperative coordination, not a
+technical lock, universal notification or restart of stopped loops.
+
+## Bind the program and its sources
+
+Use existing repository inventories, source maps and
+[release custody tools](../docs/RELEASE_OPERATIONS.md#download-and-reproduce).
+The collector's ten-repository allowlist is a discovery aid, not proof of whole
+program coverage. Explicitly account for relevant research repositories, result
+families, shared engines, formal layers and published consumers. Explain inactive
+or excluded areas. Include authorized Drive/Dropbox/Library dependencies only
+within existing custody/sharing permissions. Record access failures and missing
+payloads; do not publish private material or widen access to finish the audit.
+
+For each object bind repository/full commit, exact path/blob, bytes and SHA-256.
+For non-Git material bind version/immutable identity where available, captured
+byte hash and custody location. Bind consumed sections/extraction rules, hypotheses,
+parameter domains and interfaces, original review bodies, logs, manifests and
+configuration/toolchain identities. Distinguish source and execution-host commits.
+Preserve failed runs and their amendments.
+
+Reuse the existing dependency graph; an audit's evidence can contain a bounded
+edge crosswalk without becoming another scientific register. Identify unmapped
+edges and unresolved imports. Delta coverage follows impacted consumers and the
+upstream premises needed to assess them; gaps encountered on that closure remain
+explicit. An unchanged proof is reusable only at unchanged reviewed bytes,
+hypotheses and consumed dependency scope.
+
+## Review, findings and repairs
+
+Allocate disjoint substantive scopes plus an integration/consistency read. Seek
+fresh nonauthor/provider-distinct readers when useful. Record actual agent,
+provider, authorship, prior review and shared-context exposure for each scope.
+Author replays are not nonauthor reviews; same-provider review and shared accounts
+earn no organizational-independence credit. Missing required human review or
+formal statement alignment remains missing.
+
+Each finding records exact source, affected consumers, severity, evidence or
+counterexample, owner, disposition and repair verification. Separate source/custody
+or missing coverage; mathematical statement/proof/hypothesis/dependency; numerical
+certification or empirical limitations; formal kernel evidence versus statement
+alignment; and engineering/integration/documentation defects. Keep scientific
+acceptance distinct from all of these. Green CI, scalar Lean evidence, enclosure
+arithmetic, a merge or audit-complete label cannot substitute for another predicate.
+Existing scientific flags, explicit stops and HOLD/AMEND findings retain meaning.
+
+Disposition each finding as repaired-and-verified, unresolved/blocking, deferred
+with consequences, or inapplicable with evidence. Renaming a defect nonblocking
+does not resolve it. State which conclusions cannot be relied on. Consequential
+repairs receive a separate reviewer and affected-closure verification at successor
+bytes; retain the original failure and review. Prepare repairs outside the frozen
+cut, then obtain an acknowledged successor cut. Never silently amend old evidence.
+
+## Release and next baseline
+
+Coordinator and assigned reviewers reconcile agreed coverage, findings, affected
+consumers, original execution receipts, lineage and final identities. Required
+checks bind the actual release candidate/tested commit. Unchanged mathematical
+reviews can carry forward only after documented dependency comparison.
+
+A clean release requires complete agreed coverage, verified repairs, no unresolved
+blocking finding for the declared use, and explicit limits for deferred/excluded
+areas. Otherwise publish a **partial or blocked audit**, separating usable from
+unusable conclusions. It can seed delta work only for evidenced coverage; gaps
+and unresolved findings carry forward.
+
+Normally record affected owners' release/abort acknowledgment before resuming
+paused integration. If an owner cannot acknowledge, the coordinator or named
+recovery custodian may use only the pre-agreed abort/resume conditions: document
+the confirmed unavailability or lease-expiry trigger, refresh live ownership and
+source identities, and record a successor custodian's actual scoped pickup.
+Reconcile competing claims without overwriting active peer work. Preserve the
+missing acknowledgment and frozen evidence; publish a partial or blocked audit
+with an explicit abort/resume disposition naming the refs released from the pause.
+Silence or timeout alone is neither agreement nor clean release, and this recovery
+does not satisfy missing clean-release evidence. Name the next baseline identity,
+inherited gaps and next milestone/risk for reconsideration. Queued changes belong
+to subsequent work, not the frozen conclusion.
+
+## One discoverable record per audit
+
+Keep the report beside the audited work or in existing `audits/` or `reviews/`,
+linked from the relevant current disposition and [workspace guide](../docs/WORKSPACE.md).
+Use existing R17 surfaces where applicable. Add no global status register, scheduler
+or per-pass checklist service. The report contains:
+
+1. Audit identity/date, coordinator, trigger, delta/full depth, intended use and
+   predecessor report/manifest hash, or explicitly no established predecessor
+2. Scope/exclusions, owner acknowledgment links, frozen source identities,
+   dependency crosswalk and drift checks
+3. Coverage by object/section/domain/edge: fresh work, exact reused evidence and
+   rationale, samples, exclusions and missing work
+4. Actual reviewer lineage/exposure, linked verdicts and original execution
+   receipts, including failed or unavailable checks
+5. Findings, affected conclusions, dispositions and successor repair verification
+6. Planned/actual cost and depth, limits, release/abort acknowledgment, next
+   baseline and next milestone/full-audit reconsideration trigger
+
+Use one canonical inventory and one immutable handoff with the existing
+[delivery builder](../docs/RELEASE_OPERATIONS.md#compact-research-deliveries).
+Verify membership and bytes and link one completion receipt. Reference predecessor
+IDs/hashes instead of duplicating payloads unnecessarily; private evidence stays
+private. A later receipt need not rebuild the archive to include itself.
+
+The existing [fixed-target completion audit](../docs/research-translation/20260930/COMPLETION_AUDIT.md)
+and [source-recovery audit](../docs/public-math/recovery-20260927/LIBRARY_PUBLICATION_AND_ORIGIN_AUDIT.md)
+retain their bounded scopes. Neither becomes a whole-program baseline by citation.
+Hashes establish identity, not proof correctness or permanent finality.
diff --git a/governance/OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md b/governance/OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md
index ef115d709..1fdf54837 100644
--- a/governance/OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md
+++ b/governance/OP-WORKFLOW-20260930.md
@@ -127,6 +127,11 @@ reconcile it. Do not bypass protection or simulate another account's approval.
 
 ## Deliver one useful record
 
+For occasional coordinated audits after substantial progress, use the
+[milestone-audit protocol](OP-MILESTONE-AUDITS-20261001.md). It adds agreed
+snapshots, recorded coverage and dependency-aware delta/full audit choices;
+it does not trigger a freeze, full replay or scheduler after every pass.
+
 Use one canonical delivery inventory, one immutable handoff per checkpoint and
 one completion receipt. Derived summaries link these identities. Reference
 predecessor deliveries by immutable ID/hash; copy their payloads only when needed