Anumati: Proof of Adherence as a Formal Consent Model for Autonomous Agent Protocols

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 16 Apr 2026] Anumati: Proof of Adherence as a Formal Consent Model for Autonomous Agent Protocols Ravi Kiran Kadaboina As autonomous AI agents increasingly call other agents to complete tasks on behalf of a human principal, a structural accountability gap has emerged: the calling agent accepts the terms of service of the callee without any protocol-level mechanism to prove that it understood those terms or that it subsequently honoured them. Authentication protocols such as OAuth and mutual TLS establish who may call which capability. They do not address under what conditions a permitted call may be made, and those conditions change as the callee's policies evolve. In this paper we formalise the distinction between proof of acceptance (a timestamped acknowledgement) and proof of adherence (a per-action reasoning record citing the specific clause evaluated). We propose three primitives (PolicyDocument, ConsentRecord, and AdherenceEvent) that together constitute a versioned, append-only consent model for agent-to-agent communication. The model is instantiated as a non-breaking extension to two widely used agent protocols: the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A TLA+ specification of the consent lifecycle, together with a reference Python implementation of the chain integrity and adherence trail validators, is available in the accompanying repository. Comments: 25 pages, 5 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ACM classes: D.4.6; C.2.0; D.2.4 Cite as: arXiv:2604.16524 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.16524v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16524 Focus to learn more Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19606339 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ravi Kiran Kadaboina [view email] [v1] Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:48:21 UTC (853 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)