diff --git a/AGENTS.md b/AGENTS.md
index 7c7a5eeeb3c..98e7cd4ac9d 100644
--- a/AGENTS.md
+++ b/AGENTS.md
@@ -438,10 +438,10 @@ recognised and the whole block lands under it, leaving two; the session-URL form
 verbatim and a bare one lands under it, leaving two. ⛔ A tail bare footer on a comment is the
 platform's, not your form downgraded. Which layer does this is unknown; don't go establishing
 it. **Commit message:** an agent commit ends with the model-free trailer pair
-`Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_<id>` and `Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>`,
-and the pre-push hook refuses a model identifier in that pair; no model identifier lands in a PR title or body,
-a comment, a changeset, a doc or a code comment. The one exemption is a REPORTING one: a harness-written
-`Co-Authored-By` trailer is not declared a deviation; the pair stays model-free; landed history is not rewritten.
+`Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_<id>` and `Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>`, and the
+pre-push hook refuses a model identifier in that pair; no model identifier lands in a PR title or body, a comment, a
+changeset, a doc or a code comment. Two exemptions: a harness-written `Co-Authored-By` trailer (REPORTING: not declared
+a deviation; landed history is not rewritten) and a verbatim maintainer ruling preserved as a quotation block.
 
 **GitHub mutates body BYTES — spell poison-shaped tokens out in words, never literally.**
 Regex literals and script-tag-shaped tokens go in fenced code with the dangerous character