Cognitive Admission Control makes an agent produce a witness certificate before it is allowed to mutate infrastructure

arXiv 2609.16313·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

An agent can hold authorization to change external infrastructure while holding no evidence the change is ready. CAC makes that evidence explicit: a policy maps a typed action and its modeled risk to obligations naming predicates, evidence classes, scope, freshness and witness-set constraints; a deterministic evaluator returns satisfied, violated or unresolved, where unresolved emits a targeted evidence-acquisition request, and admission yields a certificate binding the action, its witness manifest and dispatch-time guards. In 390 CAC trials out of 2,730 controlled local runs, 120 effects completed with no harmful effects, while a live-policy baseline matched the completion count but admitted a constructed correlated-witness failure. The authors are explicit that guarantees are policy-relative and these are implementation behaviors, not production failure rates.