New SAB framework cryptographically controls AI agent actions in production

The Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB) tackles a fundamental security gap in modern AI systems: non-deterministic agents that can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources. Existing IAM policies, consensus protocols, and audit logs either enforce static permissions or merely record actions after the fact. SAB introduces an assurance airlock that intercepts every agent proposal, converts it into a typed execution contract (C), and binds that contract to cryptographic evidence digests (H(E)) and current policy versions. These contracts then travel through consequence-aware certification paths before the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate (Ω) strictly scoped to execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window.

Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies the certificate, performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks, and only then invokes the actual infrastructure APIs. The authors detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize admission and revocation invariants, and present preliminary feasibility results from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. The model ensures that autonomous reasoning cannot directly mutate state, turning delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact—a critical advance for safely deploying agentic systems in production environments.