Authority at Commit Time: Reject-and-Rerun Semantics for Governed Agentic Systems

2026-09-25

AI Summary

This study addresses the problem of enterprise agents losing execution authority due to state changes by modeling them as proposal producers and proposing a validation mechanism based on commit-time rejection and resynchronization. The approach integrates optimistic concurrency control, semantic verification, and transactional outbox techniques. By introducing read sets containing canonical authorities and model components, it strictly validates dependencies during the commit phase and rejects stale work. Experimental results demonstrate that under full mediation, the mechanism successfully processes eighteen external effects with zero false positives, achieving selective rollback and recovery while effectively ensuring the legitimacy of controlled effects.

Abstract

Enterprise agents can compute for seconds or hours from a snapshot of policy, facts, task state, models, tools, and verifiers that may change before their work reaches the world. Completion alone therefore cannot confer institutional authority. We treat agents as proposal producers and a logically authoritative service as the sole authority for governed effects. At admission, the service compares a proposal's declared dependencies and component manifest with current state, applies the current verifier, and either reserves an idempotent effect for outbox dispatch or rejects affected stale work for resynchronization and rerun. Unaffected work may continue; lost responses resolve through canonical verdicts and receipts. The protocol composes optimistic concurrency control, semantic verification, and transactional outbox dispatch. Its distinctive read set includes normative authority and the model components that produced the proposal. We evaluate the design through an implemented governed-work lifecycle, a local authority, outbox, and reconciliation composition, and a multi-process fallback that delegates effect authority when complete mediation is unavailable. The local composition preserved selective fallback, unaffected work, retry and restart recovery, and package reconstruction. Complete mediation produced 18 authority commands and 18 external effects. Direct-credential arms produced eight additional effects, all detected with independent journal reconciliation and none falsely detected in the mediated control. The results support commit-time reject-and-rerun semantics and expose the clock, lease, ordering, and quorum obligations introduced by delegated admission. They do not establish prevention or reversal of bypass effects, external-journal completeness, production throughput, wide-area availability, semantic completeness, or verifier correctness.

Problem

• Agentic Systems
• Commit-time Authority
• Governed Effects
• Stale Work
• Semantic Verification

Innovation

• Reject-and-Rerun Semantics
• Optimistic Concurrency Control
• Governed Agentic Systems
• Transactional Outbox
• Semantic Verification