Autonomy You Can Trust: Why Trustworthy Autonomy Requires Authority to Live in the Object, Not the Host
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Every autonomous system must decide locally, in the moment, without a round-trip to a central authority — a constraint imposed by physics, not preference. Yet the prevailing trust models assume a central point of deference (an identity provider, a policy server, a certificate authority, or a human in the loop), and the dominant safety paradigm bolts an external governor onto a probabilistic controller. Neither survives the disconnection that defines autonomy. This paper argues that trustworthy autonomy requires authority, governance, and identity to be carried inside the data object the system acts on — the object-as-authority model long known to capability security — and that the forcing function making this a prerequisite is autonomy itself, not decentralization. It holds even when the underlying infrastructure is fully centralized. We describe a carried-governance substrate in which identity, governance, lineage, routing, and execution become properties of the object; give an honest account of what software can and cannot guarantee against an adversarial host; and argue that the recombination is novel because the prior art teaches away from it, toward centralization.
Author: Clark, Nicholas
Language: English
Topic: Access Control and Trust
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7165158131
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