arXiv AI

Compositional Policy Violations: When Step-Level Compliance Fails In Agentic AI Workflows

The paper introduces the concept of Compositional Policy Violations (CPVs), where each step in an agentic AI workflow passes its individual compliance check, yet the overall execution violates higher‑level policies such as referral thresholds or authority limits. It categorizes CPVs into four types—Authority Creep, Threshold Laundering, Cumulative Sum Violation, and Context Collapse—and argues that the appropriate remedy depends on where the guarded quantity changes. To address this, the authors propose a provenance‑aware runtime architecture that evaluates policies over complete execution traces, recomputing guarded quantities from raw provenance rather than relying on step‑level outputs.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

One Gate Is Not Enough: Composing Stateful Pre-Action Controls for Agentic AI

The paper investigates how multiple pre‑action controls—authority, resource, and evidence gates—interact in agentic AI systems. It formalizes remediation‑induced control coupling, showing that remediation can invalidate earlier judgments and that the order of remediation matters. The authors propose a remediate‑and‑regate protocol to restore soundness, analyze non‑commuting remediation operators, and demonstrate the approach on a deterministic open‑data artifact with three published engines.

By Gaston Besanson
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Specifying AI-SDLC Processes: A Protocol Language for Human-Agent Boundaries

arXiv:2606. 20615v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents now act as first-class members of the software development lifecycle, but the instruments teams use to direct them enforce nothing: process encoded in prompts is flexible but unenforceable, while workflow formalisms are enforceable but do not model autonomous agents.

By Ylli Prifti, Pasquale De Meo, Alessandro Provetti
arXiv AI
Jun 9

From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing

arXiv:2606. 08932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases.

By Jian Chen, Siyuan Li, Chucheng Wan, Zixuan Yuan
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Runtime Governance for Agentic AI: Action-Boundary Control with Trusted Provenance and Fail-Closed Execution

The paper introduces Aegis, a runtime governance system for agentic AI that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision layer before tool execution. Aegis evaluates proposals against active policy, resolves provenance server‑side, fails closed under uncertainty, and routes selected cases through a Senate‑style settlement process. In a sandbox evaluation across 6,300 rows, Aegis prevented all governed mock‑tool applications and risky side‑effect completions, preserving provenance and quorum evidence for all settled cases.

By Adam Mazzocchetti
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Securing Multi-Tool AI Agent Chains With Dynamic, Real-Time Compositional Policies

arXiv:2607. 03423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agent implementations such as frontier coding agents chain multiple tools at runtime that create a security surface that per-tool guardrails are unable to address, as individually permitted tools can violate organizational policies when composed.

By Chris Schneider, Kriti Faujdar, Philipp Schoenegger, Ben Bariach
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Governance-as-Code: Translating EU AI Act Technical Requirements into Executable Compliance Pipelines for Generative AI Systems

The paper introduces Governance-as-Code (GaC), a framework that translates the EU AI Act’s technical requirements into 43 machine‑checkable acceptance criteria across six compliance modules. GaC runs within a CI/CD pipeline, producing Article‑indexed audit evidence and providing actual Rego policy code. The authors validate GaC on two enterprise deployments, showing it reproduces manual audit findings—including three penalty‑triggering violations—while reducing audit labor by about 75%.

By Rudrendu Kumar Paul, Sourav Nandy