A stronger recognizer is good news for Sign First. It should reduce interruption and improve candidate quality without forcing the school or learner into a new trust model.
That is why recognition, academic assurance, language-model routing, and governed learning are separate layers. A provider can be replaced without silently changing what the learner authorized.
The same boundary can serve a browser experience, an ASD-owned companion, or an MCP host: accept bounded evidence, expose uncertainty, require signer confirmation where needed, and send only confirmed intent.
Provider neutrality is not a logo wall. Every route has to earn a live claim through programmatic access, permitted use, privacy controls, provenance, output semantics, and an independently testable failure surface.