A Hardware-Isolated, Sub-Millisecond Runtime Audit Architecture for Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems via Pre-Actuation State Dissolution

Core Motivation: Latency Asymmetry and Non-Separable Exposure Current autonomous agent safeguards rely on perimeter policies evaluated at the API dispatch boundary. This approach fails structurally: The Latency Gap: The interval between internal intent formation and external action serialisation is approximately 200 ms, whereas human operator orientation requires hundreds of seconds. Post-hoc human review is forensic rather than preventive. Local Predicate Failure: Multi-agent exposure is superadditive across sequences of individually permitted calls. We formally prove that no local predicate evaluated on single actions can bound an exposure functional that is not additively separable across those actions (Proposition 1). The Automated Metacognitive Protocol (AMP) AMP shifts runtime enforcement from the network boundary directly into the inference path: Non-Differentiable Shadow Taps: Residual-stream activations are tapped across selected layers with an enforced stopgrad boundary, introducing zero gradient pressure to optimize around the monitor (Assumption A1). Permission Manifold Scoring: Hidden states are projected via low-rank audit operators ($k = 32, d = 8192$) and evaluated against an approved operating envelope using Mahalanobis distance with Ledoit-Wolf shrinkage for covariance estimation. Dual-Path Temporal Filtering: Divergence is evaluated using an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) for acute spikes and a one-sided CUSUM statistic to catch sub-threshold, incremental drift attacks. Pre-Actuation State Dissolution: Upon threshold breach, the architecture applies a scheduled orthogonal subspace projection to recursively remove the unaligned direction across downstream layers until the intent magnitude reaches a zero-weight vacancy threshold (Proposition 4). Unlike boundary blocking, which preserves unaligned intent in context to drive re-planning and rebound dynamics, it structurally eliminates representational support before token serialisation. Intelligence-Invariant Hardware Floor: Actuation lines pass through a normally-open physical relay held closed by a signed, high-frequency enclave heartbeat. Power or heartbeat loss drops the rail into a safe state invariant to counterparty reasoning capability (Proposition 5). Computational and Latency Budget Analytical derivation across twelve tapped layers yields an audit cost of approximately 6.6 MFLOP per token. On dedicated audit silicon, this results in an analytical budget of under 20 µs end-to-end, maintaining an operational margin of $10^4$ within the 200 ms action boundary. Design Lineage and Empirical Scope Functional Phenomenology (Section 1.4): The four load-bearing priors—non-interfering observation (satipaṭṭhāna), triadic failure roots (lobha, dosa, moha), pre-manifestation state removal (samuccheda vs. vikkhambhana), and structural vacancy (anattā)—are adapted from the Pali Canon strictly as functional systems phenomenology and structural engineering priors. All properties stand independently on control-theoretic and linear-algebraic formulations. Validation Status: The paper presents an architectural specification with analytical guarantees. Section 8.5 explicitly outlines nine falsifiable empirical quantities, including audit-space separability, false-positive rates on benign traffic, and rebound coefficients reserved for future experimental benchmark validation