A controlled experimental environment isolating the governance structure of AI autonomy through three fixed design primitives — delegation, boundaries, reversibility — and evaluating their effect through observable outcomes.
When AI system outputs are attributed to the AI as an autonomous agent rather than to the humans whose configuration choices produced them, governance becomes structurally invisible. This project names that condition misattributed intelligence, and proposes four governance primitives as the minimum condition for making the distribution of agency visible again: delegation scope, boundary enforcement, reversibility, and intervention capacity. Bounded Autonomy for AI operationalizes this claim through a deterministic proof-of-concept simulator across twelve domain contexts. The results demonstrate that governance structure, not AI capability, is the primary determinant of controllability outcomes.
The scope of authority granted to an autonomous agent. Determines which decisions the agent may make independently versus which require human confirmation or escalation.
Authority scopeHard constraints on the action space. Define the envelope within which the agent operates — the perimeter that, if crossed, triggers a violation event or intervention.
Action constraintsWhether an action can be undone. Actions classified as irreversible carry higher governance weight — their occurrence constitutes a qualitatively different outcome class.
Undo capacityThe active response mechanism triggered when a governance threshold is crossed. Converts detection into action — halting, escalating, or redirecting an agent when delegation or boundary conditions are violated.
Active responseThe governance frontier this framework identifies but cannot yet operationalize. Contestability — the capacity for affected parties to see, challenge, or reject autonomous decisions — marks the boundary of what bounded autonomy can currently guarantee.
Frontier
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Run all 8 scenarios in the simulator to see the full governance dataset.
Go to simulatorComplete the experiment to unlock this section.
Run all 8 scenarios in the simulator to see the full governance dataset.
Go to simulatorComplete the experiment to unlock this section.
Run all 8 scenarios in the simulator to see the full governance dataset.
Go to simulator