Janus: Evidence-Before-Effect Sagas and Offline-Verifiable Provenance for Agentic LLMs

Knowing how often a language model fails does not explain where its errors concentrate. When auditors examine many explanations, the strongest observed pattern may arise by chance. We introduce Janus, a procedure for checking proposed error patterns before reporting them. Janus starts with a fixed list of yes/no properties of the examples being evaluated, such as whether the input is long. For each property, it compares the model's error rates on examples with that property and those without it. To see how large a difference can arise by chance, it repeats this calculation after shuffling the yes/no labels across examples without changing the group sizes. These shuffled properties are called decoys. A pattern is reported only if the size of its error difference meets a threshold set using decoys. On separate held-out examples, the same group must still have the higher error rate and the difference must meet a minimum, which was chosen in advance. In a controlled experiment, where the model must find a code in documents containing tables of staff, projects, and renewal codes, Janus confirms five related patterns of higher error rates on tasks requiring more lookups across tables. It also confirms a sixth pattern: lower error rates on examples with the needed information at the ends of the tables. In our samples from the MuSiQue and LongBench v2 public benchmarks, SliceLine finds groups with high error rates, while Janus reports no confirmed error patterns for the example properties we chose to test. For comparison, we use standard tests that shuffle errors and account for testing many candidates. With the same holdout check, they confirm two to six controlled patterns, depending on the test and threshold, and none on either benchmark. In simulations with no real error patterns, Janus reports false patterns more often than Benjamini-Hochberg, depending on the decoy count.

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.

LLM agents can commit durable effects from authority evidence that was valid earlier in execution: a DOM snapshot, approval epoch, version witness, branch token, or worker result. We study the commit boundary at which earlier authority evidence no longer authorizes a durable effect. We call this property commit-time authorization: a durable effect is authorized only if the witness that licensed its derived state remains fresh, causally prior, bound to the same effect, and eligible at commit time. We build a controlled-invalidation suite spanning browser, tool/API, and multi-agent workflows. The suite preserves the user goal and payload shape while invalidating the authority relation before durability. In the primary 54-task matrix, endpoint success remains high: 262/270 runs reach the visible result. Only 55/270 are authorized completions; among the 216 invalidating rows, 207 commit after the authorizing path has failed. All 54 clean controls remain authorized, and a separate 54-run authority-preserving check produces no unauthorized commits. We then evaluate mitigation families. Prompt caution and single-condition checks are insufficient because different hazards break different boundary conditions. Defenses work when they refresh, rebind, replan, or refuse at the durability boundary. CommitGuard, a fail-closed boundary monitor, blocks stale durable-effect attempts on protected commit surfaces when runtimes emit witness, dependency, binding, and eligibility signals. The result is a reporting and runtime-design lesson: endpoint success is a utility metric; authorized commit is a security property.