Foundational
How you build it
I
Governance is architectural, not operational.
II
The spawn chain is the authority chain.
III
The ledger is ground truth.
Tenets
The foundational elements of Agent Responsibility Engineering.
The tenets define the posture of ARE: build governance into the architecture, run agents through scoped authority, demand legible proof, and refuse unknown action paths.
Operational
How you run it
IV
Intelligence never grants authority.
V
Scope is a contract, not a suggestion.
VI
Trust has a half-life.
Epistemological
How you know it
VII
Every agent must be provably legible.
VIII
Proof requires falsification.
Posture
How you hold the line
IX
An unknown agent is an ungovernable agent.
X
The system must explain itself.
Reading The Tenets
They are not slogans. They are constraints.
Each tenet is meant to narrow the design space. If a proposed agent architecture cannot preserve scope, legibility, denial, and evidence, it is not yet governed in the ARE sense.
Architecture before operations
ARE starts in the system design. A policy that only appears in a runbook is too late to govern autonomous action.
Authority before intelligence
The model's capability can inform a decision, but it cannot grant the right to execute that decision.
Proof before trust
Legibility, falsification, and ledgered evidence make governance inspectable rather than ceremonial.