@techreport{zagarella-autonomy-governor-01,
    number =    {draft-zagarella-autonomy-governor-01},
    type =      {Internet-Draft},
    institution =   {Internet Engineering Task Force},
    publisher = {Internet Engineering Task Force},
    note =      {Work in Progress},
    url =       {https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zagarella-autonomy-governor/01/},
    author =    {Roberto Antonio Zagarella},
    title =     {{Pre-Action Risk-Graded Assurance for Agent Interactions}},
    pagetotal = 12,
    year =      2026,
    month =     aug,
    day =       23,
    abstract =  {Governance of autonomous agents today is largely expressed as boundary enforcement: an action is permitted or blocked at the point it is attempted, per a policy evaluated at that boundary. As agents span heterogeneous action types — authenticating a human, executing a delegated task, selecting a computational resource — a single, uniform way to express "how much assurance this action requires, before it proceeds" is missing. This document describes an interface for pre-action, risk-graded assurance: a policy stage that, before an agent action proceeds, derives an assurance requirement from a risk signal and expresses that requirement in a domain-appropriate form, recording the decision in an audit record and optionally binding it to a verified human root. It defines the interface and the audit-record fields, not any particular risk-scoring method or control law. This document also describes the autonomy-asymmetry control law: a feedback loop coupling assurance requirements to VERIFY-phase pass rates, with fast-down (immediate elevation on failure) and slow-up (hysteresis- governed relaxation on sustained success) asymmetry. The iteration governor is described as the per-packet instance of this control law, and the phase-seal chain as its sensor. This document is offered as input to the proposed AUDIT working group's work on authorization state over time and action provenance.},
}