The Basket Before the Harvest: Governance Boundaries and Constitutional Authority in Advanced AI Systems

The Basket Before the Harvest presents a constitutional governance architecture for agentic artificial intelligence. It argues that authority, identity, verification, delegation, and revocation must be established before an autonomous system is permitted to act—not added after deployment as corrective controls. The paper introduces the basket as the governed structure within which capabilities may develop and operate. It describes a framework based on Human Primacy, distributed authority, continuous verification, bounded delegation, attributable action, and reversible control. The architecture is intended to prevent unchecked concentration of authority, ambiguous responsibility, silent drift, and irreversible handoff to autonomous systems. This paper is part of the TrineLab research program on constitutional governance for advanced AI.