GlassBox Alpha is a paper-only autonomous options trading agent built on Alpaca. It solves a specific problem in agentic trading: an AI model should contribute judgment without having unrestricted control over financial actions. Completed five-minute Alpaca bars feed a deterministic strategy engine that constructs one exact SPY or QQQ trade. The code fixes the contracts, expiry, quantity, limit price, and maximum loss before the AI sees the proposal. A structured AI critic may only return ALLOW or VETO. It cannot change the trade or submit an order, and any timeout, invalid response, altered candidate ID, or unsupported evidence fails closed. Before execution, an independent 32-check risk kernel recomputes the trade economics and verifies account identity, paper mode, market time, option structure, exposure, DTE, quote freshness, liquidity, position limits, drawdown, and idempotency. A failed check produces ABSTAIN. Approved orders can be submitted as atomic multi-leg limit orders through the official Alpaca CLI, while a deterministic supervisor manages whole-position exits. Every decision creates a hash-chained Trade Passport containing the market evidence, AI verdict, risk observations, order payload, and result. Judges can inspect credential-free replay scenarios for approval, AI veto, stale quotes, and excessive spreads. The result is not another prediction bot, but a verifiable decision system in which probabilistic AI advises and deterministic controls retain authority.
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