Abstract:Autonomous agent systems fail not only due to incorrect decisions, but due to executing decisions whose authority no longer holds at runtime. Prior work defined Reconstructive Authority (RAM) as a condition for valid execution: actions are permitted only if authority can be constructed from current state.
This paper addresses enforcement at runtime: how to enforce this condition in a running system.
We introduce a runtime execution model in which authority is evaluated at action time and execution is conditioned on its constructibility. This extends the execution state space beyond admit/deny with a third state, halt, representing cases where authority is undefined due to incomplete or uncertain observability.
We define a concrete execution protocol including dynamic dependency resolution, authority reconstruction, and explicit decision semantics. We further introduce a Recovery Loop that integrates drift detection (IML) with execution control (ACP), allowing the system to suspend execution, acquire missing information, and re-attempt authority reconstruction.
We show that this model guarantees safety -- no action is executed without constructible authority -- and conditional liveness: execution resumes when authority-defining variables become observable.
This work operationalizes reconstructive authority as a runtime enforcement mechanism, providing the execution semantics required to apply RAM in real systems.
| Comments: | Agent Governance Series, Paper P6. Companion papers on arXiv: P0 (2604.17511), P1 (2603.18829), P2 (2604.17517). P3/4 and P5 submitted concurrently (pending arXiv IDs). Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19699460 |
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Software Engineering (cs.SE); Systems and Control (eess.SY) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.23935 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2605.23935v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.23935 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
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| Related DOI: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19699460
DOI(s) linking to related resources |
Submission history
From: Marcelo Fernandez [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:32:09 UTC (21 KB)