| EL | Execution Legitimacy Whether a specific execution remains a legitimate exercise of conferred authority at the moment it occurs. The five conditions operationalize this determination. | determination | Fourteen sources. Three added 2026-08-03, all as support or complement rather than competition: aviation dispatch release as a two-party determination made against current conditions, financial settlement finality as an ex ante determinate irrevocability point, and certificate-bound admission as a conditional-execution model. Support remains strongest from outside AI. Competing treatments continue to address individual conditions rather than the integrated five. | |
| RA | Runtime Admissibility The determination of whether execution should proceed right now. Not whether memory, data, context, or a consequence is admissible — those may be inputs or subordinate questions, but RA governs execution. | gate | Twenty-one sources. Six added 2026-08-03. The certificate-bound admission and execution pair (arXiv 2606.11632, 2606.20520) is the corpus's first two-paper treatment separating proposal, admission, and execution with a signed artifact carried between them, with prototype measurements on AWS and Kubernetes. Foundational support continues to come from runtime verification and monitorability literature, now joined by financial settlement-finality standards on the ex ante determinacy of the irrevocability point. No enterprise-scale operational case study found. | |
| AC | Authority Continuity The preservation of valid, correctly scoped, and traceable authority across identity, delegation, context, and execution as conditions change over time. Broader than delegation-chain correctness: includes whether authority remains legitimate through the interval between grant and effect. | continuity | Twenty sources. Four added 2026-08-03. arXiv 2607.23586 addresses grant survival under agent mutation under the name authorization continuity, with a fixed transition envelope and effect ceiling; arXiv 2606.20520 revalidates against live state at execution rather than at grant. Aviation dispatch regulation (14 CFR 121.533 and 121.663) supplies a long-standing regulatory analogue in which release authority is joint, continuously revisited between release and completion, and non-delegable at the dispatch level. Catalogued treatments continue to address subsets of the claim: agent mutation, infrastructure state, or delegation structure, rather than authority across identity, delegation, organizational context, and execution together. Delegation chains remain structurally representable without non-widening enforced by construction in any deployed standard. | |
| AD | Authority Drift The divergence, over time, between authority a system retains and the authority current organizational circumstances would justify. Not privilege accumulation — a technically correct entitlement may still be illegitimate in current context. | failure | Three sources, unchanged this week. No competing treatments found, and none of the seven sources added 2026-08-03 competes with the canonical definition. arXiv 2606.20520 checks live-state drift at execution against a certified contract, but that comparison is infrastructure state against a contract rather than retained authority against current organizational circumstances, and it was not tagged AD. No standardized business-state event vocabulary exists. No unit of measure, continuous formulation, or threshold located in any source. AD remains the thinnest claim in the corpus by competing coverage and an open search lane. | |
| CD | Capability Drift Change in an autonomous system's effective ability to produce consequences without a corresponding reevaluation of the authority governing those capabilities. Arises through learned skills, tool composition, memory, model updates, reusable behaviors, delegation, or environmental change. | failure | Three sources, up from one. Two added 2026-08-03 substantively address capability evolution rather than state persistence: a state-bound authorization model that fixes an immutable effect ceiling at grant time and proves that mutation cannot amplify protected effects beyond it, where the mutations enumerated include acquiring skills and tools, revising workflows, and delegating work (arXiv 2607.23586); and a lifecycle-time upgrade governance pipeline with interface, policy, behavioral, and recovery compatibility checks, gated activation, shadow deployment, online monitoring, and rollback, measured on an embodied-agent testbed (arXiv 2604.08059). Both report formal or quantitative results; neither uses the term Capability Drift. A third source added this week, arXiv 2605.26542, is catalogued under AC and RA rather than CD: it governs authority attenuation across a composed tool chain within a session, which is adjacent compositional attenuation rather than change over time in effective ability to produce consequences. Still absent from the record: any enterprise deployment case study, any continuous measure or threshold for capability change, and any treatment tying capability change to organizational rather than technical authority. | |
| GE | Governance Evidence Independently reviewable evidence showing what legitimacy determination was made, which authority and contextual signals informed it, and why the execution was permitted, denied, escalated, or attested. Logs may contribute evidence; event records alone do not establish governance reasoning. | evidence | Thirteen sources. Three added 2026-08-03. Signed decision and outcome records bound to a certified execution contract (arXiv 2606.20520) and evidence-digest binding at admission (arXiv 2606.11632) extend the catalogued set of cryptographically bound evidence models. The signed dispatch release under 14 CFR 121.663 is the corpus's first regulatory instance of a governance artifact that two named parties must both sign before an operation may begin. Regulatory demand remains documented with no finalized technical standard. | |
| OBJ | Evaluation Object The composite execution event: principal, delegation chain, agent, action, target, context, intent, and provenance relevant to a specific execution. Treated as an adopted and refined architecture choice, not a novelty claim. | design | Nine sources. One added 2026-08-03: arXiv 2606.11632 compiles agent proposals into typed execution contracts bound to evidence digests and policy versions, adding a fifth independent 2026 work locating governance at an execution, admission, or bind boundary. | |
| PE | Policy vs Enforcement The distinction between governance that is declared and governance that is operationally established in the execution path. A supporting claim, not AOI-originated. | supporting | Well covered externally. Primary source is Cavallo's described-versus-established framing; supported by practitioner and distributed-systems material. | |
| MKT | Market Conditions External technical, regulatory, operational, and commercial developments that increase the need for Runtime Governance but do not themselves establish its architecture. | context | Ample. NHI ratios, over-permissioning rates, IAM capability gaps, and regulatory timelines all documented from multiple sources. | |
