Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 24 Jun 2026] Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems Jakob Salfeld-Nebgen 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 authoritative source, cryptographically bound to a declared intent, and evaluated by a deterministic policy. Decisions are recorded in a tamper-evident log amenable to independent re-verification. We present a proof-of-concept implementation and illustrate the model with examples from software deployment and clinical prescribing. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2606.26298 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.26298v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.26298 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jakob Salfeld-Nebgen [view email] [v1] Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:43:00 UTC (63 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR 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?)