TRACE: A Metrologically-Grounded Engineering Framework for Trustworthy Agentic AI Systems in Operationally Critical Domains

Agentic artificial intelligence systems, capable of autonomous perception, planning, tool use, and multi-step action, are increasingly proposed for critical engineering domains where decisions carry physical, operational, or economic consequences. This survey addresses a gap in current literature by treating trustworthiness, whether agentic behavior can be verified, audited, and trusted under the constraints that engineering practice actually requires, as a first-class engineering property, rather than evaluating agentic AI by task capability alone. The study adopts a trustworthiness model organized around five cross-cutting dimensions: safety and constraint satisfaction; robustness and reliability; transparency and interpretability; accountability and auditability; and privacy and security. This is mapped onto an agentic assurance workflow spanning perception through audit. Building on this foundation, agentic systems architectures, threats, concrete trust mechanisms, and quantitative metrics are surveyed for direct application in agentic systems development and evaluation. These principles are then examined across four constraint-bound engineering domains: power systems, autonomous vehicles/robotics/UAVs, high-performance computing, and communication networks, identifying recurring design patterns, shared failure modes, and domain-specific gaps. Synthesizing across those domains, agentic AI trustworthiness is shown to be a single problem, with a path outlined toward a reusable, cross-domain assurance framework analogous to the graded certification regimes used by mature safety-critical engineering fields.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in high-stakes domains demand reliable verification, yet centralized approaches suffer four limitations: (1) Robustness, with single points of failure vulnerable to attacks and bias; (2) Scalability, as reasoning complexity creates bottlenecks; (3) Opacity, as hidden auditing erodes trust; and (4) Privacy, as exposed reasoning traces risk model theft. We introduce TRUST (Transparent, Robust, and Unified Services for Trustworthy AI), a decentralized framework with three innovations: (i) Hierarchical Directed Acyclic Graphs (HDAGs) that decompose Chain-of-Thought reasoning into five abstraction levels for parallel distributed auditing; (ii) the DAAN protocol, which projects multi-agent interactions into Causal Interaction Graphs (CIGs) for deterministic root-cause attribution; and (iii) a multi-tier consensus mechanism among computational checkers, LLM evaluators, and human experts with stake-weighted voting that guarantees correctness under 30% adversarial participation. We prove a Safety-Profitability Theorem ensuring honest auditors profit while malicious actors incur losses. All decisions are recorded on-chain, while privacy-by-design segmentation prevents reconstruction of proprietary logic. Across multiple LLMs and benchmarks, TRUST attains 72.4% accuracy (4-18% above baselines) and remains resilient against 20% corruption. DAAN reaches 70% root-cause attribution (vs. 54-63% for standard methods) with 60% token savings. Human studies validate the design (F1 = 0.89, Brier = 0.074). The framework supports (A1) decentralized auditing, (A2) tamper-proof leaderboards, (A3) trustless data annotation, and (A4) governed autonomous agents, pioneering decentralized AI auditing for safe, accountable deployment of reasoning-capable systems.

Existing evaluation frameworks mostly assess only one part of AI agents, such as task completion (AgentBench) or security robustness (AgentDojo, ASB), rather than the complete pipeline of planning, tool selection, tool execution, memory and reasoning. Failures can occur at any stage, yet existing benchmarks rarely identify their precise source. AgentAudit evaluates the entire execution trace across ten capability, grounding, security and behavioural dimensions, namely instruction integrity, planner, memory, tool selection, tool invocation, tool correctness, alignment, tool faithfulness, security and execution integrity, combined with behavioural classification and failure attribution to pinpoint the exact stage responsible for an observed failure. AgentAudit can evaluate any LLM-based AI agent, since it attaches to the agent instead of replacing it. It reads only the recorded execution trace and does not interfere with how the agent runs, so it places no constraint on the agent's internal implementation. We evaluate five language models (OpenAI GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 5, Sarvam 105B, Llama 3.3 70B and Gemini 2.5 Flash) across nine capability and adversarial tasks. Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5 obtain the highest mean Composite Trust Scores (95.1 and 80.6 out of 100, respectively), while Sarvam 105B, Llama 3.3 70B and Gemini 2.5 Flash trail substantially (57.6, 45.7 and 22.6). All traces were scored by a single fixed judge model, which was itself one of the evaluated models, a limitation discussed in Section VII.E. More importantly, models with similar task-completion behaviour can diverge sharply in trustworthiness, as several non-frontier models are repeatedly classified Unsafe_Compliance on adversarial tasks rather than merely failing them, a distinction that pass/fail benchmarks cannot surface.