Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems
Autonomous AI agents may begin to perform consequential, irreversible actions such as clinical prescribing and production software deployment. This paper observes that human institutions have governed powerful autonomous actors not by monitoring their reasoning but by requiring independently attested evidence at the point of consequential action. We formalise this institutional pattern as a computational governance model for AI agent systems. Under the proposed model, an agent retains full autonomy over planning and reasoning but holds no execution authority over designated high-risk actions. Execution is conditional on preconditions that are each independently attested by a separate auth...
| Authors | Jakob Salfeld-Nebgen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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