Title: Ethical Hyper-Velocity (EHV): A Hardware-Rooted Zero-Trust Runtime Enforcement Architecture for Agentic AI Systems

Abstract

As autonomous agentic systems expand into regulated critical infrastructures, a significant safety gap emerges due to the absence of mechanistic, hardware-based enforcement for rapid policy updates. To address this, we introduce Ethical Hyper-Velocity (EHV), a governance-aware runtime enforcement framework designed for agentic systems. EHV integrates four core components: Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) to generate tokens within inline policy bounds, Causal Graph CRDTs for policy synchronization using vector-clock ordering, hardware-attested execution within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), and OSCAL-formatted machine-readable audit logs.

In contrast to retrospective auditing standards such as ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF, which incur policy latencies ranging from 14 to 30 days, EHV moves the Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) directly into the inference pipeline. This is achieved through a Governance-Aware Just-In-Time (JIT) Compiler. Within a bounded model and under explicitly defined assumptions, the architecture enhances traceability, minimizes enforcement latency, and enables the formal verification of safety invariants.

Our evaluation via TLA+ model checking confirms that non-compliant agentic actions are unreachable within the verified bounded operating state space. The verification process generated 1,738 states (324 distinct) with a depth of 8, resulting in zero violations. By reducing runtime enforcement to O(1), EHV mitigates the traditional conflict between deployment speed and governance integrity, shifting Governance Latency from O(days) to O(1).

The distinct contribution of EHV lies in its unified integration of GCD, Causal CRDTs, TEE attestation caching, and bounded formal verification into a single, hardware-rooted enforcement architecture—a synergy not found in any contemporary system. We demonstrate the architecture’s efficacy through a pediatric oncology dosage use case, highlighting its potential applicability to other regulated critical sectors, including financial compliance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure control.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-02 00:00:00 UTC