Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems

Autonomous AI agents may begin to perform consequential, irreversible actions such as clinical prescribing and production software deployment. This paper observes that human institutions have governed powerful autonomous actors not by monitoring their reasoning but by requiring independently attested evidence at the point of consequential action. We formalise this institutional pattern as a computational governance model for AI agent systems. Under the proposed model, an agent retains full auton

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ethics.ai (24 June 2026), “Governing Actions, Not Agents: Institutional Attestation as a Governance Model for Autonomous AI Systems,” evidence record 600, https://ethics.ai/record/600 (originally published by arXiv).

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