Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

A research team has proposed AgenticRei, a governance framework for autonomous AI agents that goes substantially beyond the permit/deny binary of existing policy engines like XACML or Rego. The system introduces obligation lifecycle management, conditional dispensations, and ontological reasoning, evaluated at runtime by a logic engine operating entirely outside the LLM itself. As agentic systems are deployed across organizational boundaries in healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity, the absence of such governance infrastructure is an increasingly serious gap this work begins to address.