Governance Infrastructure for Autonomous Systems: Toward Distributed Runtime Legitimacy and Sovereign Operational Control

This paper introduces the concept of governance infrastructure for autonomous systems as a foundational operational layer positioned between autonomous capability, runtime execution, institutional authority, certification ecosystems, and societal trust. The paper argues that large-scale autonomous ecosystems may require continuously operating governance infrastructures capable of maintaining operational legitimacy, certification continuity, runtime assurance, distributed trust coordination, and sovereign operational control across heterogeneous environments. The proposed framework introduces the concept of distributed runtime legitimacy and explores governance infrastructure layers including capability governance, runtime legitimacy validation, certification continuity, revocation architectures, interoperability coordination, and institutional governance ecosystems. Rather than focusing on specific implementation mechanisms, the paper presents a conceptual and architectural framework for understanding governance infrastructure as a potential foundational infrastructure class for scalable autonomous systems. The paper further examines strategic, economic, regulatory, and interoperability implications associated with governance continuity in future autonomous ecosystems. This work presents a conceptual governance framework and does not disclose implementation-specific enforcement mechanisms, cryptographic architectures, or hardware-level execution control mechanisms.