OpenKedge: Governing Agentic Mutation with Execution-Bound Safety and Evidence Chains

The transition of agentic AI from brittle prototypes to production systems is stalled by a pervasive crisis of craft. We suggest that the prevailing orchestration paradigm-delegating the system control loop to large language models and merely patching with heuristic guardrails-is the root cause of this fragility. Instead, we propose Arbiter-K, a Governance-First execution architecture that reconceptualizes the underlying model as a Probabilistic Processing Unit encapsulated by a deterministic, neuro-symbolic kernel. Arbiter-K implements a Semantic Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to reify probabilistic messages into discrete instructions. This allows the kernel to maintain a Security Context Registry and construct an Instruction Dependency Graph at runtime, enabling active taint propagation based on the data-flow pedigree of each reasoning node. By leveraging this mechanism, Arbiter-K precisely interdicts unsafe trajectories at deterministic sinks (e.g., high-risk tool calls or unauthorized network egress) and enables autonomous execution correction and architectural rollback when security policies are triggered. Evaluations on OpenClaw and NanoBot demonstrate that Arbiter-K enforces security as a microarchitectural property, achieving 76% to 95% unsafe interception for a 92.79% absolute gain over native policies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cure-lab/ArbiterOS.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly issue API calls that mutate real systems, yet many current architectures pass stochastic model outputs directly to execution layers. We argue that this coupling creates a safety risk because model correctness, context awareness, and alignment cannot be assumed at execution time. We introduce Sovereign Agentic Loops (SAL), a control-plane architecture in which models emit structured intents with justifications, and the control plane validates those intents against true system state and policy before execution. SAL combines an obfuscation membrane, which limits model access to identity-sensitive state, with a cryptographically linked Evidence Chain for auditability and replay. We formalize SAL and show that, under the stated assumptions, it provides policy-bounded execution, identity isolation, and deterministic replay. In an OpenKedge prototype for cloud infrastructure, SAL blocks 93% of unsafe intents at the policy layer, rejects the remaining 7% via consistency checks, prevents unsafe executions in our benchmark, and adds 12.4 ms median latency.

Modern cloud and enterprise systems rely on identity-centric authorization, assuming that callers possessing valid credentials are safe to execute commands. The emergence of autonomous AI agents invalidates this assumption: agents can generate syntactically valid but semantically unsafe actions, making standing privileges a significant operational risk. This risk becomes especially acute in sovereign AI systems, where autonomous agents may interact with cloud infrastructure, regulated data, financial workflows, and national-scale digital services. Governed mutation substrates reduce this risk by interposing on agent actions: agents submit intents, infrastructure evaluates context and policy, and execution is mediated. However, this shifts the trust boundary: how can the decision to authorize an intent be made verifiable, distributed, and replayable? We introduce a Distributed Trust Framework (DTF), a verification framework for governed mutation systems that computes execution authority from structured, verifiable artifacts. DTF introduces a Justification Proof to encode the admissibility basis of an action, a consensus model for independent evaluation, an ephemeral Execution Identity derived from the approved proof, and an append-only Evidence Chain that preserves the authorization lifecycle. Under stated substrate assumptions, this architecture enforces a compact authorization invariant: no high-stakes execution without a proof object, no derived authority without consensus, and no valid mutation detached from evidence. We define the model, instantiate it over an OpenKedge-based governed mutation substrate, and show how it maps onto cloud-native environments. By shifting authorization from standing identity to proof-derived authority, DTF provides an infrastructure foundation for making agentic execution governable, auditable, and bounded in sovereign AI deployments.