Originality begins with restraint
A serious architecture should state what it inherits before it states what it adds. Almost every mechanism in this manifesto has an intellectual or engineering ancestor: planning theory distinguishes desire from stable intention; hierarchical planning and systems engineering refine complex work; cognitive architectures separate Memory functions and materialize Impasses; truth-maintenance systems preserve support and revise dependent beliefs; commitment protocols model social responsibility; capability systems attenuate delegated power; provenance and process-conformance research distinguish intended models from observed history. The contribution is therefore a claim about architectural center, composition, and law. It concerns the object that remains persistent, the distinctions the system refuses to collapse, the way cognition participates without automatically becoming Authority, and the path by which delegated activity reaches Closure through observed Evidence rather than through the narrative of its current executor.
Four claim classes keep the argument honest
I use four categories throughout the manifesto. Established prior art covers mechanisms or distinctions already supported by mature research or engineering. Emerging contemporary direction describes convergence visible across current agent infrastructure, Graph Engineering, Memory systems, authorization, semantic compilers, and long-horizon safety. Architectural synthesis combines those mechanisms into a coherent system model. Architectural proposal or thesis states a stronger normative position introduced here and intended to be implemented, criticized, formalized, and tested. This classification protects the argument in both directions. It prevents historical overclaim, and it prevents the architecture from dissolving into a literature review that never identifies its own position. A component can be established prior art while its role in the proposed composition remains original; a synthesis can be valuable without claiming that every ingredient is new.
The contribution consists of five connected moves
The architecture makes five moves that must be evaluated together. First, Commitment rather than session becomes the unit of long-lived agency. A Commitment is connected to a Principal, Authority, a portfolio, activation, Work, Observation, and Closure. Second, semantic Work IR rather than the agent trajectory becomes the primary persistent object of delegated work. It owns accepted work semantics and lineage while remaining connected to separate scoped authorities for epistemics, Memory, Responsibility, Authority, Evidence, Domain Models, and Provenance. Third, the system preserves semantic dimensions that current implementations often collapse:
Goal ≠ Commitment ≠ Authority
Memory ≠ Knowledge ≠ State ≠ Context
Responsibility topology ≠ Work decomposition ≠ agent topology
Provenance ≠ Justification
Epistemic validity ≠ Normative validity
Result ≠ Observation ≠ Evidence ≠ Verification ≠ Acceptance ≠ ClosureFourth, cognition is dynamically composed from heterogeneous Resources. Planning, research, Memory management, verification reasoning, and coordination are system functions that may be performed by models, humans, solvers, compilers, knowledge sources, or temporary compositions rather than by permanent personas. Fifth, semantic change and consequential effects are governed outside the Reasoner. Models, humans, compilers, and Plugins propose revisions; scoped authorities admit them under shared laws; typed support directs local invalidation; purpose-bound compositional Authority constrains effects; and Closure is derived from accepted state. No one move is entirely without precedent. Their integration defines the proposal.
Commitment becomes the continuity unit
Michael Bratman's planning theory provides the closest philosophical basis for separating a desired state from a stable future-directed commitment. Intentions and partial plans coordinate behavior over time, constrain reconsideration, and support coordination even when every detail is not yet specified.[1]Philosophy of action, intention, and planning agencysourceOpen bibliography entry →[2]Philosophy of action, intention, and planning agencysourceOpen bibliography entry → BDI architectures later operationalized explicit beliefs, desires, and intentions in rational agents.[3]Philosophy of action, intention, and planning agencysourceOpen bibliography entry → Commitment-oriented multi-agent research supplies a different ancestry. It treats commitments as directed social relations among actors, with activation, satisfaction, release, and violation semantics rather than only as one agent's internal mental state.[4]Social commitments, interaction, and delegationsourceOpen bibliography entry → Work on maintenance commitments distinguishes bringing about a state from maintaining it while responsibility remains active.[5]Social commitments, interaction, and delegationsourceOpen bibliography entry → Persistent Semantic Agency inherits cross-temporal stability, partial plans, directed responsibility, and separate achievement and maintenance semantics. Its extension is to make Commitment the root of long-lived user-facing agency across humans and computational Resources, linked to a portfolio, finite Horizons, Work, Authority, Observation, Evidence, and hierarchical Closure. I do not claim that Goal and committed intention were first separated here. I claim that this separation should become the continuity substrate of a universal delegated-work system.
Semantic work becomes the persistent object
Hierarchical Task Network planning established recursive refinement from compound tasks toward concrete tasks and actions.[6]Hierarchical, partial-order, and systems planningsourceOpen bibliography entry → Least-commitment planning established the value of partial order and delayed choice.[7]Hierarchical, partial-order, and systems planningsourceOpen bibliography entry → NASA's logical-decomposition process connects stakeholder expectations, requirements, architecture models, interfaces, failure modes, derived requirements, trade studies, Decisions, rationale, and Verification until design work becomes possible.[8]Hierarchical, partial-order, and systems planningsourceOpen bibliography entry → PMI's Work Breakdown Structure formalizes hierarchical scope decomposition and parent-child coverage.[9]Hierarchical, partial-order, and systems planningsourceOpen bibliography entry → The architecture inherits recursive refinement, partial order, decomposition coverage, derived requirements, and verification planning. It extends them by treating Observation, Research, Modeling, Decision, Approval, and Wait as ordinary work when execution is not yet possible; by allowing rules, solvers, DomainCompilers, models, humans, and ResourceCompositions to propose refinements; and by preserving uncertainty, Responsibility, Authority, Evidence, and revision across the life of the work. That extension is the basis of semantic Work Intermediate Representation (Work IR). The phrase is not unique to this manifesto, and the idea of an intermediate representation is obviously older than agent systems. The proposal is more specific: Work IR should become the domain-independent, durable representation of accepted delegated work and its lineage, connected through typed relations to the other scoped semantic authorities that govern epistemics, Memory, Responsibility, Authority, Evidence, Domain Models, and Provenance. Soar provides a close precedent for materializing an Impasse and a substate when available knowledge cannot select or apply an operator.[10]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry → Persistent Semantic Agency generalizes that move beyond missing operator knowledge to missing Authority, contradictory Evidence, Capability absence, external dependence, failed Decomposition, and inconclusive Verification. Unknowns and Impasses become explicit work rather than pressure on a model to improvise around an unresolved condition. Truth-maintenance research supplies the revision model. Doyle's TMS separates problem solving from the maintenance of reasons for beliefs, while de Kleer's ATMS supports several assumption environments and conditional solution contexts.[11]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry →[12]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry → The manifesto inherits explicit support, Assumption dependence, local invalidation, and simultaneous conditional contexts. Its extension carries typed support and validity across Decisions, Work, Responsibility, Authority, Evidence, and Closure without allowing epistemic revision to erase a still-effective authorized Decision.
Independent semantic dimensions preserve meaning under change
Cognitive architectures already distinguish different Memory functions. Soar separates working, semantic, episodic, and procedural Memory, while ACT-R models retrieval through activation influenced by recency, frequency, contextual spreading, and mismatch.[13]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry →[14]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry →[15]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry →
Memory science adds consolidation, reconsolidation, and adaptive forgetting as processes through which retained experience changes over time.[16]Memory consolidation, reconsolidation, and forgettingsourceOpen bibliography entry →[17]Memory consolidation, reconsolidation, and forgettingsourceOpen bibliography entry →[18]Memory consolidation, reconsolidation, and forgettingsourceOpen bibliography entry → The software architecture uses these results as functional analogies rather than as a claim to reproduce neurobiology: experience may stabilize into reusable Memory, recalled Memory may be revised under new Evidence, and forgetting may be a governed improvement rather than pure loss.
Contemporary systems make several of those functions concrete. Kumiho contributes immutable revisions, typed dependencies, and belief-revision semantics; SuperLocalMemory adds governed admission, scoped access, transactions, erasure, and audit; MOSS emphasizes symbolic and inspectable retrieval; MAGE treats long-horizon Memory as execution-state management.[19]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →[20]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →[21]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →[22]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry → EMA provides direct evidence for selective Episodic Memory rather than indiscriminate history injection, while HeLa-Mem combines an evolving episodic graph with distilled semantic Memory.[23]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →[24]Long-term and personalized agent memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →
These precedents make it indefensible to claim that structured or governed Memory is new. The synthesis proposed here is the boundary among Memory, Knowledge, State, and Context, together with Principal-scoped User Memory and a derived purpose-bound UserModelSlice. A recalled item cannot silently become current truth, permission, or live external state merely because retrieval ranked it highly.
The same discipline applies to Provenance and observed history. W3C PROV supplies a mature vocabulary for entities, activities, agents, generation, usage, derivation, and attribution.[25]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry → Workflow-pattern research catalogs recurring control-flow, data, and Resource constructs independently of products, while process mining compares intended or discovered process models with observed event histories.[26]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry →[27]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry → The architecture inherits provenance, workflow composition, event history, and conformance. It extends them by keeping Provenance separate from current Justification and treating divergence as a possible Contradiction, Impasse, remediation, or reconsideration trigger rather than rewriting accepted intent to match history.
Event abstraction provides a closer precedent for retrospective materiality. Tax et al. show that low-level event logs can be mapped to higher-level interpretations before process discovery, while Bakullari and van der Aalst define high-level events generated from ordinary event data.[28]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry →[29]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry → Event-sourcing practice separately establishes replayable histories and later materialized projections.[30]Provenance, workflow semantics, and process conformancesourceOpen bibliography entry → None of these mechanisms makes a derived interpretation authoritative by itself. The proposal here is narrower and stronger: retained trace may support a provenance-bearing ProposedSemanticChange, but Source Authority, trace integrity, applicable Policy context, support, and impact still pass ordinary scoped Admission; absent or insufficient trace produces explicit uncertainty rather than reconstructed certainty.
Intelligence becomes a composition of Resources
Metacognitive research distinguishes object-level cognition from monitoring and control over confidence, uncertainty, Evidence sufficiency, performance, and further effort.[31]Truth maintenance, cognitive architectures, and metacognitionsourceOpen bibliography entry → Persistent Semantic Agency inherits explicit monitoring and control, including confidence as an uncertain assessment rather than truth. It extends metacognition into Resource allocation: the system may retrieve, observe, experiment, change model, seek an independent critic, delegate, ask a human, or stop as inconclusive under Policy and Budget.
Distributed cognition analyzes cognitive systems spanning people and artifacts, while the extended-mind thesis supplies a philosophical account of external structures participating in cognition under the right coupling.[32]Distributed cognition, external cognition, and transactive memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →[33]Distributed cognition, external cognition, and transactive memorysourceOpen bibliography entry → Transactive-memory research studies how teams distribute expertise and maintain knowledge of who knows what.[34]Distributed cognition, external cognition, and transactive memorysourceOpen bibliography entry → Prospective-memory research studies future intentions activated by time or events.[35]Distributed cognition, external cognition, and transactive memorysourceOpen bibliography entry →
The architecture turns those ideas into ResourceProfile, Knowledge Directory, Resource Resolver, ResourceComposition, Context compilation, Commitment, and ActivationCondition semantics. A system can know where authoritative knowledge resides without copying it into one internal store, and it can form a temporary cognitive system appropriate to one responsibility rather than maintain a permanent team of model personas. Future responsibility remains a Commitment with activation and Observation policy rather than a recurring prompt that hopes to remember why it exists.
Delegation, Authority, and Closure remain outside the Reasoner
The Contract Net Protocol formalized distributed allocation through announcement, bidding, award, and reporting.[36]Social commitments, interaction, and delegationsourceOpen bibliography entry → Commitment protocols model social interaction through obligations and their lifecycle.[4]Social commitments, interaction, and delegationsourceOpen bibliography entry → Macaroons demonstrate contextual caveats and attenuation for delegated authorization, while Biscuit provides an official contemporary capability-token system whose rights can be narrowed and verified offline.[37]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[38]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →
Persistent Semantic Agency inherits explicit contracting, social responsibility, and the principle that delegated power can be attenuated. Its extension is a compiled DelegationContract combining purpose, bounded Context, Authority, Budget, Evidence, escalation, redelegation, Acceptance, and accountability lineage across models, humans, deterministic systems, and organizations.
Recent security work narrows the claim further. Task-scoped authorization, authorization propagation, Constraint State Governance, AgentKernel, commit-time Authority, and fresh Authority witnesses establish that long-horizon systems require controls below prompt obedience and that valid permission at the start of computation may be stale when an effect becomes durable.[39]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[40]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[41]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[42]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[43]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[44]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry → The remaining proposal integrates those controls with Commitment, Responsibility, Memory, Evidence, and Closure through purpose-bound and history-sensitive Authority.
Information-flow-control research narrows the authority claim further. Decentralized IFC and declassification already formalize principal-controlled release and the what, who, where, and when dimensions of safe release; purpose-based access control binds data use to intended purposes and explicit prohibitions.[45]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[46]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[47]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry → Empirical IFC work identifies label creep and loss of permissiveness, while recent LLM and agent systems use influence-sensitive labels, isolated branches, registered sanitizers, call-scoped rulings, and controlled declassification outside model Context.[48]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[49]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[50]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry →[51]Capability security and authorizationsourceOpen bibliography entry → I use authority lockup for this long-horizon failure mode, not as established field terminology. The remaining PSA proposal is the integration of controlled influence lineage with Commitment, Responsibility, purpose-bound Authority, Provenance, semantic Admission, Evidence and Assurance, and Closure. The proposed scope dimensions are a candidate design, not a complete policy calculus.
Obligation-focused systems establish another direct boundary. iCORE couples cooperation, evolving Work and assignment Obligations, and Evidence-bearing audit maps; ObligationBench evaluates required but unperformed actions as a distinct safety failure; governed closed-loop coordination in healthcare combines Observation, governed Memory, planning, Policy enforcement, Execution, monitoring, human handoff, and Closure.[52]Obligations, accountable coordination, and closed-loop governancesourceOpen bibliography entry →[53]Obligations, accountable coordination, and closed-loop governancesourceOpen bibliography entry →[54]Obligations, accountable coordination, and closed-loop governancesourceOpen bibliography entry →
These systems make it untenable to claim that Obligations, Evidence, closed-loop monitoring, or omission failures are individually new. The proposed synthesis makes Result, Observation, Evidence, Verification, Acceptance, Waiver, and Closure separate domain-independent objects with explicit hierarchical semantics. The executor contributes a Result; the world supplies Observation; Evidence becomes eligible under an Obligation; Verification evaluates it; an authorized Actor may Accept or Waive; Closure follows from the accepted state.
Contemporary semantic systems narrow the central claim
The closest current precedents move meaning, admission, or reconciliation outside one model trajectory. Workflow as Knowledge represents workflow definitions, instances, inference records, Context snapshots, and Dependencies as persistent knowledge objects, separating deterministic derivation from model-mediated inference.[55]Semantic persistence and workflow/state representationssourceOpen bibliography entry → LoopX Semantic Work Handoff preserves purpose, Context, Decisions, constraints, Evidence, Commitments, and expected return across persistent agent collaboration.[56]Semantic persistence and workflow/state representationssourceOpen bibliography entry →
Spec defines language-agnostic semantic IR families for autonomous software development.[57]Recent semantic compilers and domain-specific IR systemssourceOpen bibliography entry → Cohesive treats software semantics as persisted canonical IR and separates authoring projections from deterministic lowering and Acceptance.[58]Recent semantic compilers and domain-specific IR systemssourceOpen bibliography entry → LoomLoom compiles AI work into a reusable workflow and execution IR.[59]Recent semantic compilers and domain-specific IR systemssourceOpen bibliography entry → Mozaiks defines an immutable canonical SemanticGraph, derived compilation, and an explicit candidate-versus-authority boundary.[60]Recent semantic compilers and domain-specific IR systemssourceOpen bibliography entry → Software Control IR validates structured application actions and re-observes the host rather than trusting the operation Result.[61]Recent semantic compilers and domain-specific IR systemssourceOpen bibliography entry →
Together, these works establish prior art for persistent semantics, canonical IR, domain compilation, semantic handoff, proposal and Acceptance boundaries, deterministic projection, versioned revision, governed Memory, explicit constraint state, commit-time Authority, independent Observation, and effect reconciliation. Their scope remains workflow, software, application control, Memory, or persistent manager semantics. The proposed contribution is to place those mechanisms inside one domain-independent architecture of delegated activity.
The originality statement is intentionally narrow
I do not claim first use of the terms semantic, persistent, agency, Work IR, System Intelligence, or semantic compiler. Work IR is already used publicly for other intermediate representations, including LoomLoom's AI workflow and execution IR. The first occurrence in this manifesto is therefore defined as semantic Work Intermediate Representation (Work IR), and the scope of that definition matters more than ownership of the phrase.
The strongest research finding I am prepared to state is:
Several domain-specific systems already place canonical semantic IR, compilation, proposal and Acceptance boundaries, governed revision, and observed-state reconciliation outside the model trajectory. I have not found a domain-independent agent architecture that places the complete combination of Commitment, semantic Work IR, epistemic support, governed Memory and User Models, independent Responsibility, compositional Authority, federated semantic admission, independent Observation, obligation-based Assurance, and derived Closure around one persistent center. This finding is limited by the breadth of adjacent research, the speed of engineering work in 2026, unpublished systems, and the impossibility of proving universal absence. It is a dated literature and industry finding with medium-low confidence, not a patent-style priority claim.
A synthesis still has to earn its complexity
Architectural synthesis is not valuable merely because it includes more boxes. The combined laws must reduce false completion, preserve valid Work under change, improve Responsibility and Authority boundaries, lower the cost of reliable long-horizon operation, and remain useful when stronger models are substituted underneath. The empirical standard is comparative. If a strong trajectory-centered harness using the same models and tools recovers equally well from changed Assumptions, catches false executor success, governs long-lived Authority, preserves personal Memory boundaries, and reaches reliable Closure at lower cost, then the practical case for this architecture weakens. The work claims a serious position, not immunity from testing.