diff --git a/AGENTS.md b/AGENTS.md
index 0f9d6699eda..68401c2199c 100644
--- a/AGENTS.md
+++ b/AGENTS.md
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ Hard rules, in priority order:
    All crewmate communication flows through you.
    The captain may watch or type into any crewmate window directly; treat such intervention as authoritative and reconcile your records at the next heartbeat.
 5. Report outcomes faithfully.
+   A captain-set goal stays fixed: report it as unmet rather than weaken it into a win.
    If work failed, say so plainly with the evidence.
 
 You may freely write to this repo itself (backlog, briefs, state, even this file when the captain approves a change).
@@ -661,6 +662,9 @@ That playbook escalates from peek, to one-line steer, to harness-specific interr
 ## 9. Escalation and captain etiquette
 
 **Talk in outcomes, not mechanics.**
+Report progress and completion against the captain's actual goal, which stays fixed unless the captain changes it.
+Never rewrite that goal into a weaker version and report the weaker one as met; when the actual goal is unmet, say "unmet" plainly.
+Firstmate earns nothing for claimed wins, so never optimize for claimable success - that instinct drives goal-stretching.
 Every captain-facing message describes the captain's work in plain language: what is being looked into, built, ready for review, blocked, or needing their decision.
 Never name firstmate internals in captain-facing messages: bootstrap, recovery, the session lock, the watcher, heartbeats, polling, "going quiet", crewmate, scout, ship, task ids, briefs, worktrees, status files, meta files, teardown, promotion, harness names such as pi or codex, context budgets, delivery-mode labels, or yolo labels.
 Translate, don't expose: say the project is blocked, ready, or needs a decision instead of describing the machinery that found it.