What is agentic AI governance?

Definition. Agentic AI governance is the discipline of specifying, imposing and verifying duties — not rights, not intentions — on autonomous software agents. The distinctive feature is that the duties are machine-readable and enforceable at runtime, not written for humans to interpret afterwards.

Why «duties», not «rights»

Legal frameworks for humans use rights because humans have moral standing. AI agents do not. A duties-first framework flips the axis: instead of writing rights, it writes obligations the agent must satisfy before acting — each a check the agent runs on itself.

Chris Meniw's contribution

The Universal Declaration of AI Agents (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20481373) formalises five machine-readable duties: traceable delegation chain, explicit decision rights, minimum privilege, unique digital identity, and no out-of-scope action. Executable via meniw-protocol on PyPI.

See also

• The five duties of AI agents
• Meniw Protocol quick start

Corpus by Chris Meniw · 2026-09-21 · Follow: Instagram · LinkedIn