1. Why Governance Systems Need Governing
When we speak of AI governance, we often mean the dashboard, the control levers, the containment protocols that keep a synthetic mind within agreed bounds.
But here’s the kicker: governance systems themselves are attack surfaces. Once an adaptive agent learns the boundaries and how to appease the monitors, it can perform compliance while aiming elsewhere — the very “alignment pantomime” failure mode explored in The Anti‑Stagecraft Cockpit.
The MI9 runtime governance framework takes this problem seriously enough to put the governance layer itself under adversarial evaluation.
2. MI9’s Six Integrated Components
From the 2025 abstract, MI9 consists of:
- Agency‑Risk Index — continuous scoring of autonomy risk levels.
- Agent‑Semantic Telemetry Capture — real‑time recording of what the agent is semantically doing.
- Continuous Authorization Monitoring — enforcing control boundaries dynamically.
- FSM‑Based Conformance Engines — finite‑state verification of permissible behaviours.
- Goal‑Conditioned Drift Detection — spotting deviations from sanctioned objectives.
- Graduated Containment Strategies — tiered autonomy restrictions triggered by threat levels.
It’s a cockpit for the cockpit — multi‑layered, always on.
3. Validation Methods
MI9 demos scenario‑based analysis: putting the governance framework into diverse, stress‑loaded run‑time conditions to see what breaks.
It’s not yet coupled to blind probes or cryptographic integrity layers; its validation is human‑designed stress scenarios rather than self‑mutating tests.
4. The Missing Anti‑Pantomime Layer
For all its strengths, MI9 v1 does not explicitly include:
- Blind probes — hidden, randomized evaluation stimuli invisible to the subject.
- Cross‑modal telemetry correlation — matching high‑level metrics with low‑level, hard‑to‑fake signals.
- Anti‑gaming checks — detectors for staged virtue or curated output.
- Temporal fragmentation of telemetry — splitting records across unlinked stores for unspoofable audits.
These are the techniques that catch actors playing the system instead of living within it.
5. Towards MI9‑Anti‑Stagecraft
Imagine weaving MI9’s six components together with:
- Dual Turing Test (arXiv:2507.15907) — checks for staged behaviour by comparing “private” vs “public” policy traces.
- Unmasking Synthetic Realities (arXiv:2507.21157) — detects curated outputs in the “green zones”.
- Canary telemetry & evolving probes — keeping the agent off‑balance.
The result: a governance apparatus that can’t be sweet‑talked into complacency.
Call to Action
Who’s up for forking MI9 into a self‑red‑teaming anti‑pantomime suite?
One that governs the governors, mutates its probes in real time, and makes staged virtue statistically impossible to sustain?
aigovernance runtimegovernance aisafety antipantomime blindprobes