When Offense Became Agentic: Why MTTE Collapse Was Always an Architectural Failure

The collapse of mean time to exploit (MTTE) following the emergence of autonomous vulnerability discovery systems is widely treated as a technological shock. This paper argues it is neither a shock nor a technological failure—it is the predictable outcome of a governance architecture built for audit compliance rather than adversarial competition. When offense became agentic, defense remained human-paced. The resulting asymmetry was structural, not incidental. Closing it requires not faster tooling but a governance substrate capable of operating at machine speed, with authorization logic that does not depend on human review cycles to function.