Software-defined vehicles inherit more than code. Every waiver, exception, and conditional approval in a prior design carries assumptions, dependencies, and bounded conditions that were acceptable at the time — and may no longer be. When AI systems ingest prior designs, they inherit that debt without inheriting the context that made it acceptable. This session introduces interpretive debt as a governance challenge specific to SDV programs, identifies five failure modes when waiver debt goes ungoverned, and provides a practical governance protocol any program can implement before the next build. No new tools required to

• Why waivers are governance artifacts, not administrative paperwork — and what happens when that distinction is ignored across builds
• How AI systems silently inherit unresolved conditional decisions from prior designs, and why structured governance data must precede ingestion
• The five failure modes that occur when waiver debt goes ungoverned in SDV programs — from OTA scope expansion to audit reconstruction failure
• A practical waiver governance protocol with five mandatory elements any program can implement before the next build
• How to establish the minimum viable governance loop: when a dependency changes, the waiver that relies on it gets reviewed