Operationalizing Reconstructive Authority: Runtime Construction, Dependency Resolution, and Execution Gating in Autonomous Agent Systems

Abstract

Autonomous agent systems fail not only due to incorrect decisions, but due to executing decisions whose authority no longer holds at runtime. Prior work defined Reconstructive Authority (RAM) as a condition for valid execution: actions are permitted only if authority can be constructed from current state. This paper addresses enforcement at runtime: how to enforce this condition in a running system. We introduce a runtime execution model in which authority is evaluated at action time and execution is conditioned on its constructibility. This extends the execution state space beyond admit/deny with a third state, halt, representing cases where authority is undefined due to incomplete or uncertain observability. We define a concrete execution protocol including dynamic dependency resolution, authority reconstruction, and explicit decision semantics. We further introduce a Recovery Loop that integrates drift detection (IML) with execution control (ACP), allowing the system to suspend execution, acquire missing information, and re-attempt authority reconstruction. We show that this model guarantees safety -- no action is executed without constructible authority -- and conditional liveness: execution resumes when authority-defining variables become observable. This work operationalizes reconstructive authority as a runtime enforcement mechanism, providing the execution semantics required to apply RAM in real systems.