Where does authority live?
Legitimacy, public authority, non-unilateral amendment and constraints that bind machine action.
SPQR Research
Our research asks what must be true before autonomous systems can act under policy, produce defensible evidence and improve without escaping governance.
The research position
Authority, evidence and execution conditions should be separable from the model generating the proposal, then inspectable by people who did not build the system.
Model proposes · authority verifies · runtime enforces · evidence remainsFour research lines. One operational question.
The corpus moves from jurisprudential questions to concrete system boundaries. Each line asks a different part of the same governance problem.
Legitimacy, public authority, non-unilateral amendment and constraints that bind machine action.
Signed policy state, provenance, active authority and deterministic governance artefacts.
Trusted provenance, mapped operations, fail-closed execution and per-action verdicts.
Auditable proposals, challenge evidence, containment and held-out evaluation rather than invisible self-modification.
Start here
These works are the shortest path into the architecture: the runtime boundary, the proof model and the governed-improvement problem.
Bounded claims
Serious governance research should expose its boundaries rather than smuggling confidence through tone.
Public research library
Preprints, working papers and whitepapers are labelled by their public source. Use the filters to move through the research lines.
9 public works shown
A trusted runtime seam between agent proposals and tool effects.
An auditable candidate lifecycle instead of invisible self-modification.
Signed policy state and auditable governance artefacts at the execution boundary.
The broader constitutional-governance thesis and supporting SPQR architecture.
Public participation, action in the absence of authority and plural governance.
Verifiable policy state and non-unilateral amendment as a basis for trust.
Cryptographically enforced machine constraints as operational legal instruments.
Binding, verifiable constraints established at system genesis.
Non-discretionary responsibilities before broader operational freedom.
No papers match that search and filter.
From paper to product
Praxis and Aegis turn the research questions into concrete assurance and control surfaces.

Test what organisational evidence supports, preserve ambiguity and remediation decisions, and establish approved authority.
Explore Praxis →
Verify signed active policy state at the action boundary and preserve a per-action decision receipt.
Explore Aegis →Research should invite challenge
If you are working on AI governance, assurance, runtime control or regulated agent deployment, bring the hard questions.
Public papers · inspectable architecture · bounded claims