Runtime Governance for Agentic AI: Action-Boundary Control with Trusted Provenance and Fail-Closed Execution

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arXiv:2608.16891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI systems request tool actions that can modify files, send messages, launch jobs, or change workflow state. This shifts the safety problem from harmful text generation to harmful operational side effects. Prompt-level governance can shape model behavior, but it does not create an execution boundary. We introduce Aegis, a runtime governance system that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision layer before tool execution. The model proposes; the trusted runtime decides. Aegis evaluates proposals against active policy state, resolves provenance server-side, fails closed under uncertainty, and routes selected cases through Senate-style settlement, a quorum- based non-unilateral authorization path. We evaluate Aegis on a repeated sandbox corpus spanning five run families, 42 tasks, three conditions, and ten repeats per family. Across 6,300 rows, prompt-policy conditioning produced 79 risky comparator-path leakage rows. Across 2,100 Aegis-governed rows, the system recorded zero governed mock-tool applications and zero governed risky side-effect completions. All 1,832 Aegis-attempted governed rows preserved trusted Aegis-resolved provenance, and all 1,019 Senate-settled rows had quorum and final signed tally evidence. These results do not prove general autonomous-agent safety. They support the narrower systems claim that, in this evaluated sandbox corpus, runtime action-boundary governance prevented observed risky proposals from becoming governed side effects.