The paper introduces Runtime Assurance Contracts (RAC) as a formal policy framework for high‑risk AI agents, addressing the "assurance‑transition gap" by binding autonomy boundaries, component eligibility, evidence state, transition policy, human‑review capacity, and non‑compensatory gates. RAC allows soft metrics to influence routing while mandating retries, switches, escalations, deferrals, or stops when mandatory gates fail or are unknown, ensuring aggregate performance cannot alone authorize action. The authors define the contract, evidence record, permission rule, and five invariants, and evaluate RAC through deterministic failure‑injection studies, hand‑authored traces, and a prospective synthetic holdout, comparing it to score‑only and restricted protocol baselines.
By Serhii Zabolotnii
arXiv:2608. 13867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are commonly evaluated as models but deployed as systems.
By Stephanie Jarmak
Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit.
whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."
By Stefan G. Creadore
SWE-Prometheus is a new benchmark that evaluates large language model coding agents on the broader task of improving repository engineering governance, rather than just fixing individual issues. It presents fixed snapshots with open-ended objectives, requiring agents to identify risks, prioritize interventions, and verify changes across six governance dimensions. The benchmark includes 60 repositories and reports metrics such as Normalized Governance Improvement and behavior‑breakage rates, providing a nuanced view of how different models affect governance artifacts and execution‑backed improvements.
By Jiajun Wu, Leixin Sun, Zihan Tan, Yitao Liu, Shuo Li, Jiaru Qian, Shanghaoran Quan, Chuangxin Zhao, Yangxu Liao, Yang Liu, Bin Chong, Guancheng Wan
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
arXiv:2609.37315v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-using agents are entering settings where a wrong action carries real cost, and the benchmarks certifying them grade what each simulated tool cal...
By Rohith Reddy Bellibatlu, Zichong Wang, Wenbin Zhang
arXiv:2606. 13468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are increasingly used to generate pull requests (PRs) that propose code fixes in software projects.
By Mahmoud Abujadallah, Ali Arabat, Mohammed Sayagh
arXiv:2607. 25398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model agents are increasingly deployed under standing instructions: a system prompt, a policy file, or a skills document is placed in context, and the agent is trusted to let it govern every action that follows.
By Liudas Panavas, Sebastian Minus, Bradley Monton, Derek Ray, Suhaas Garre, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen
arXiv:2608. 11727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a coding agent obeys a rule, it may simply have been going to do that anyway.
By Zining Huang, Haoran Que, Hong Zeng, Ge Zhang, Zuo Wang, Jin Chen, Haodong Wang, Zhongfei Hou, Changxin Pu, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang
The paper investigates a critical flaw in AI coding-agent systems such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor, where the action approved by a human is not the same as the action executed by the harness. It introduces the concept of Approval Laundering, categorizing six systematic failure modes—Scope, Argument, Temporal, Tool, Delegation, and Semantic laundering—and demonstrates these failures through controlled experiments. The authors propose an Approval Token mechanism that mitigates some laundering types but leaves others unaffected, highlighting the limitations of current enforcement strategies.
By Yang Wang
arXiv:2609.35889v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents select and execute third-party artifacts. Different implementations can return the requested output while producing...
By Xiaoyu Xu, Zi Liang, Minxin Du, Qipeng Xie, Qingqing Ye, Yuyuan Li, Haibo Hu
Adversarial Review (AR) is a minimal cooperative code‑review protocol that employs a main coding agent, a reviewer, and a critic. The reviewer evaluates code while the critic audits the review through structured disagreement before the main agent edits. On multiple benchmarks (LiveCodeBench, SWE‑PRBench, SWE‑bench Verified), AR achieves higher pass rates or F1 scores than larger multi‑agent baselines, demonstrating that effective code review can be achieved with only three agents and minimal, evidence‑grounded disagreement.
By Eric S. Qiu, Joyce Gill