Abstract
Operational consequences may persist after an autonomous agent’s authority to initiate new work has been blocked. Delegated execution can remain active and commitments unsettled, while some effects may legitimately survive through transfer or retention. Authorization, task lifecycle, distributed termination, and finalization mechanisms address different parts of this lifecycle; none of those predicates alone establishes whether the retiring principal’s attributable consequences have reached allowed terminal dispositions. This note defines Bounded Agent Closure (BAC), a deterministic evidence verifier over a principal-relative consequence graph. BAC requires explicit source coverage and attribution, disposition-specific terminality, source-stability evidence, fresh observation of every reachable consequence, and final-pair semantic convergence under declared stability contracts. The frozen v0.3 implementation evaluates evidence across four domains, includes eight canonical boundary cases, and issues CLOSED only within the declared profile and source contracts. BAC defines a post-quiescence verification boundary for scoped, machine-auditable decommissioning claims.
Research artifacts
The Technical Note documents the Bounded Agent Closure research model and verifier; the separately archived software record preserves BAC v0.3.1.
- Technical Note
- Full-text PDF
- Software
- Bounded Agent Closure v0.3.1 · Zenodo software archive
Scope and record relationship
The Zenodo Technical Note record is the persistent archival record for this publication. The RISU-hosted PDF is an exact institutional full-text mirror of that record, not a new edition.
The Zenodo software archive is a separate record for Bounded Agent Closure v0.3.1.
Citation
Moon Lee, “From Revocation to Closure: Verifying Attributable Consequences in AI Agent Decommissioning,” RISU Technical Note 2026-01, RISU Institute, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22005109
- Technical Note DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22005109
- Software DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22005419