AEGIS: A Constitutional Governance Architecture for Autonomous AI Agents

Abstract

Autonomous AI agents increasingly execute consequential actions against operational infrastructure. This paper presents AEGIS, a constitutional governance architecture that enforces deterministic policy at the agent action boundary — post-reasoning, pre-execution. AEGIS satisfies Anderson's reference monitor properties, aligns with all four functions of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and introduces a decentralized federation model for cross-organizational governance intelligence sharing. Submitted to IEEE Computer, Special Issue on AI Governance and Compliance.