Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems
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
By Jakob Salfeld-Nebgen