School of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Liverpool, UK · Department of Computer Science, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE
Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and unenforced concept, as no current agentic framework produces the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance needed to assign it when harm emerges from compositions no single party designed. We position that what is missing is not better benchmark-level evaluation but
explicit provenance across the full agentic lifecycle, which is the only viable basis for making responsibility computable and actionable. We advance this agenda along four axes: establishing
why such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing
what it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing
how it can be made computable across four lifecycle layers with preliminary experiments showing that provenance is estimable and interveneable online before irreversible harm accumulates, and examining
who bears responsibility through a concrete agentic incident. Explicit provenance is not a discretionary refinement but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, and no stakeholder across its ecosystem can afford to treat it as optional.