Beyond Memory: A Transactional Continuity Kernel for Long-Lived AI Agents

Persistent AI agents accumulate versioned state across long horizons, but storage retention alone does not identify authoritative state. Without an explicit control plane, unmediated updates by models, tools, and background workers risk stale overwrites, un-audited exposures, and self-authorizing privilege escalation. We argue that agent state governance is an infrastructural activation problem, defining continuity as an unbroken, authorized lineage of accepted branch heads. We present the Conti

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ethics.ai (12 August 2026), “Beyond Memory: A Transactional Continuity Kernel for Long-Lived AI Agents,” evidence record 18796, https://ethics.ai/record/18796 (originally published by arXiv).

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