Criticality-Based Guard Rail Validation for AI Agent Decisions in Autonomous Telecom Networks

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) shows promise for automating O-RAN wireless supervisory control, but translated intents still require an executor-side decision before live network actuation. Existing control flows lack explicit semantics for whether an intent should commit, gate for evidence, or reject under stale telemetry, concurrent policies, deadline and bandwidth limits, and rollback constraints. We propose Progressive Risk-Gated Actuation (PRGA), an executor-side contract for risk-gated wireless intent execution. PRGA structures each intent into executable local triage (C0), on-demand coordination evidence (C1), and post-hoc provenance support (C2), with C2 kept off the online safety path. A deterministic two-stage policy checks expiry, freshness, rollback-handle validity, local conflict, blocking preconditions, and planner-executor risk divergence from C0, then retrieves C1 only for gated intents when deadline and bandwidth budgets allow; evidence-mandatory gates reject when required C1 is unavailable. On two 3GPP-parameterized energy-saving and slice-SLA benchmarks, PRGA reduces time-to-first-safe-action by 23.3-27.4% and per-commit control-plane bytes by 52.7-54.2% against a decision-identical eager full-evidence cost-overlay comparator, thereby isolating retrieval-cost accounting; remains non-inferior within a pre-declared 0.5 percentage-point unsafe-action margin against an invariant-respecting static-threshold comparator; and rejects 100% of injected over-threshold stale inputs in the stale-state fault campaign. On these benchmarks, PRGA improves supervisory responsiveness and control-plane efficiency within the evaluated unsafe-action boundary.

Autonomous AI agents can remain fully authorized and still become unsafe as behavior drifts, adversaries adapt, and decision patterns shift without any code change. We propose the \textbf{Informational Viability Principle}: governing an agent reduces to estimating a bound on unobserved risk $\hat{B}(x) = U(x) + SB(x) + RG(x)$ and allowing an action only when its capacity $S(x)$ exceeds $\hat{B}(x)$ by a safety margin. The \textbf{Agent Viability Framework}, grounded in Aubin's viability theory, establishes three properties -- monitoring (P1), anticipation (P2), and monotonic restriction (P3) -- as individually necessary and collectively sufficient for documented failure modes. \textbf{RiskGate} instantiates the framework with dedicated statistical estimators (KL divergence, segment-vs-rest $z$-tests, sequential pattern matching), a fail-secure monotonic pipeline, and a closed-loop Autopilot formalised as an instance of Aubin's regulation map with kill-switch-as-last-resort; a scalar Viability Index $VI(t) \in [-1,+1]$ with first-order $t^*$ prediction transforms governance from reactive to predictive. Contributions are the theoretical framework, the reference implementation, and analytical coverage against published agent-failure taxonomies; quantitative empirical evaluation is scoped as follow-up work.

AI agents are increasingly involved in network automation, where they can initiate configuration changes through mediated operational interfaces and assess the resulting state. Nonetheless, operational networks usually span many devices and administrative domains. Realizing an operator's intent requires coordinating agents with distinct authority scopes that define the resources they can access, the operations they can invoke, and the network state they can observe. This division limits the blast radius of an erroneous action but fragments the evidence needed to assess the network-wide outcome. Successful execution of a configuration action proposed by one agent does not establish that remote devices responded as intended or that routing changes reached the required devices. A valid observation may also become stale after a subsequent change. Before the coordinated operation can be declared complete, a trusted assurance layer must collect current observations from the required scopes and determine whether they collectively support the operator's intended network-wide outcome. To address the completion admission problem, we present EvidenceNet, a runtime assurance layer for deciding whether coordinated agent operations have achieved an operator's network intent. Its broker collects the post-change observations required by a completion contract, and its admission gate checks that the evidence comes from the required scopes, remains current, and satisfies the task rules. A verifier agent provides an additional assessment of the observation content. Experiments on live routing networks show that post-change state checks recognize successful outcomes that configuration-action records alone cannot establish. Controlled interventions further show that EvidenceNet rejects completion when otherwise satisfactory observations have the wrong source, have been substituted, or are stale.