A CANONICAL ANSWER · FROM THE VINDEX KNOWLEDGE GRAPH
The manifest gives banks meaning
Weight files describe storage only; moe_manifest.json says what the stored banks are for. It binds each bank to a programme — the small recipe of operations that consumes it, drawn from a named registry (gated-mlp-v1, gpt-oss-expert-v1, latent-moe-v1, …). The binary carries no programme identity of its own, and the manifest is the single authority for that fact.