Evidence Channels and Deceptive Terrain: Two Substrate-Layer Mechanisms for Governing Agentic Systems

Governing an autonomous system requires two halves: enforcement that acts before the system does, and evidence that reconstructs what happened after. This document specifies two substrate-layer mechanisms for the second half and the terrain around it. Evidence channels are what make post-inference governance real — not logs, which record events, but lineage, which records causality: authority, provenance, orientation, constraint, execution, and outcome, captured immutably and anchored in the substrate so that an engagement can be reconstructed even under adversarial conditions. Deceptive terrain is a complementary defensive pattern that raises the cost of automated reconnaissance and reveals an adversary’s intent by shaping what an attacker’s agent believes the environment to be. Neither mechanism is offered as a guarantee. The stronger properties each depends on — evidence that cannot be forged even by the agent that produced it, terrain an automated attacker cannot cheaply distinguish from the real — are design objectives that require validation, not claims of an achieved system. Both are deposited under restricted access to establish a durable, attributable record of the architecture.