From Craft to Kernel: A Governance-First Execution Architecture and Semantic ISA for Agentic Computers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 20 Apr 2026] From Craft to Kernel: A Governance-First Execution Architecture and Semantic ISA for Agentic Computers Xiangyu Wen, Yuang Zhao, Xiaoyu Xu, Lingjun Chen, Changran Xu, Shu Chi, Jianrong Ding, Zeju Li, Haomin Li, Li Jiang, Fangxin Liu, Qiang Xu The transition of agentic AI from brittle prototypes to production systems is stalled by a pervasive crisis of craft. We suggest that the prevailing orchestration paradigm-delegating the system control loop to large language models and merely patching with heuristic guardrails-is the root cause of this fragility. Instead, we propose Arbiter-K, a Governance-First execution architecture that reconceptualizes the underlying model as a Probabilistic Processing Unit encapsulated by a deterministic, neuro-symbolic kernel. Arbiter-K implements a Semantic Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to reify probabilistic messages into discrete instructions. This allows the kernel to maintain a Security Context Registry and construct an Instruction Dependency Graph at runtime, enabling active taint propagation based on the data-flow pedigree of each reasoning node. By leveraging this mechanism, Arbiter-K precisely interdicts unsafe trajectories at deterministic sinks (e.g., high-risk tool calls or unauthorized network egress) and enables autonomous execution correction and architectural rollback when security policies are triggered. Evaluations on OpenClaw and NanoBot demonstrate that Arbiter-K enforces security as a microarchitectural property, achieving 76% to 95% unsafe interception for a 92.79% absolute gain over native policies. The code is publicly available at this https URL. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.18652 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.18652v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.18652 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xiangyu Wen [view email] [v1] Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:25:37 UTC (4,513 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI 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?)