Sovereign-OS: A Charter-Governed Operating System for Autonomous AI Agents with Verifiable Fiscal Discipline

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 14 Mar 2026] Sovereign-OS: A Charter-Governed Operating System for Autonomous AI Agents with Verifiable Fiscal Discipline Aojie Yuan, Haiyue Zhang, Ziyi Wang, Yue Zhao As AI agents evolve from text generators into autonomous economic actors that accept jobs, manage budgets, and delegate to sub-agents, the absence of runtime governance becomes a critical gap. Existing frameworks orchestrate agent behavior but impose no fiscal constraints, require no earned permissions, and offer no tamper-evident audit trail. We introduce Sovereign-OS, a governance-first operating system that places every agent action under constitutional control. A declarative Charter (YAML) defines mission scope, fiscal boundaries, and success criteria. A CEO (Strategist) decomposes goals into dependency-aware task DAGs; a CFO (Treasury) gates each expenditure against budget caps, daily burn limits, and profitability floors via an auction-based bidding engine; Workers operate under earned-autonomy permissions governed by a dynamic TrustScore; and an Auditor (ReviewEngine) verifies outputs against Charter KPIs, sealing each report with a SHA-256 proof hash. Across our evaluation suite, Sovereign-OS blocks 100% of fiscal violations (30 scenarios), achieves 94% correct permission gating (200 trust-escalation missions), and maintains zero integrity failure over 1,200+ audit reports. The system further integrates Stripe for real-world payment processing, closing the loop from task planning to revenue collection. Our live demonstration walks through three scenarios: loading distinct Charters to observe divergent agent behavior, triggering CFO fiscal denials under budget and profitability constraints, and escalating a new worker's TrustScore from restricted to fully authorized with on-the-spot cryptographic audit verification. Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, demo paper. Code: this https URL Demo: this https URL Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ACM classes: I.2.11; H.4.1 Cite as: arXiv:2603.14011 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.14011v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.14011 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Aojie Yuan [view email] [v1] Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:25:31 UTC (1,332 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 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?)