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.

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