Verifiable execution is a moving target. TEE attestation is real but operationally heavy; zero-knowledge proofs for LLM inference are advancing but not yet practical at the scale agents demand.
Rather than waiting, Cleon ships a Cloud Mode runtime today and exposes the same agent interface to verification modes that arrive later. Personas and skills don't change. Execution records gain stronger guarantees.
This staging is the part developers usually care about. They want to build now and not throw away the integration when stronger verification ships. The contract — persona identity, skill manifests, execution records — is what stays stable across all three modes.
It is also the part that lets the protocol be honest. Cloud Mode is trust-the-operator. TEE Mode is trust-the-hardware. ZK Mode is trust-the-math. The user picks based on the call, and the manifest's risk class hints at the right floor.