Governance at the Boundary: How Agent Decomposition Degrades Policy Compliance
Existing agent benchmarks ask whether the agent finished the task. We ask whether it finished it within policy. We introduce Fiducia-bench, a benchmark for the governability of financial agents---whether they escalate when obligated, abstain when required, and leave an auditable trail---and use it to study a question no prior benchmark addresses: does decomposing an agent into components degrade its governance? It does, and the mechanism is specific. Policy-relevant facts discovered by one component are attenuated at the handoff boundary before reaching the component that must act on them. In a 626-episode experiment across 100 KYC/AML task variants, two models, and three architectures, a...
| Authors | Bowen Li, Guojun Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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