Venue: IEEE Computer
Submission date: March 2026
Status: Submitted; tracking review outcome
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0
What it is
A submission to IEEE Computer presenting the AEGIS approach to autonomous-agent governance as a constitutional architecture: a small, versioned, hashed charter that every agent action is evaluated against, with the charter itself treated as a first-class governance artifact under change control.
The paper argues that prose-based governance instructions (“be helpful, be honest, follow the rules”) are fragile under adversarial pressure and unauditable in operation. A constitutional architecture replaces prose with structured claims that survive translation, deposit (Zenodo), and downstream policy compilation.
Position
- Governance prose is not a contract. It is interpretation surface — agents read it as suggestion, attackers read it as override target. A constitution must be a structured, versioned artifact.
- Constitutional articles are evaluable. Each article maps to a small set of policy primitives (capability scope, intent constraint, delegation depth, audit obligation) — not free-text guidance.
- Versioning is governance. A change to the constitution is a versioned event: hash-tagged, deposited, communicated. Run-time policy evaluation references the constitution by version, not by retrieval.
- Reference implementation: the AEGIS Constitution at aegis-constitution.com, 11 articles, with a Zenodo deposit DOI for every published version.
Canonical text
The authoritative submission lives at aegis-governance/docs/position-papers/ieee-computer-2026/. PDF is the version-of-record.
Relationship to other AEGIS work
- The constitutional architecture this paper advocates is implemented in production at aegis-constitution.com.
- The runtime mechanics ride on top of the Cross-Cutting Runtime Enforcement implementation.
- The Microsoft AGT example demonstrates how a constitutional governance profile compiles to two industrial policy backends (Cedar and Rego) without prose.
Status
The IEEE Computer submission is one of three formal AEGIS publication tracks (alongside the IEEE TNSE edge-governance paper and the IEEE Data Descriptions ATX-1 dataset paper). Outcome pending.