Runtime Governance Body of Knowledge Glossary
A July 2026 discussion-draft glossary contributed through the American Bar Association’s Autonomous Systems Governance Working Group (ASG-WG) proposed-lexicon process, establishing precise runtime-governance terminology for architecture, implementation, assessment, training, standards alignment, and conformance.
American Bar Association Autonomous Systems Governance Working Group
The American Bar Association’s Autonomous Systems Governance Working Group (ASG-WG) held its inaugural session on April 17, 2026, in Atlanta. Co-chaired by Tim Reiniger and Prof. Jon Garon, the Working Group brings together legal practitioners, technologists, academics, policymakers, industry representatives, and other stakeholders to examine legal, ethical, regulatory, and operational issues presented by autonomous and AI-enabled systems.
The ASG-WG is a joint effort of the SciTech Risk and Trust Management Committee and the Cyber and Technology Committee of the ABA Business Law Section. Its organizers also invite broader collaboration with related ABA sections and committees as well as external organizations.
The Working Group aligns with and advances the objectives of ABA Resolution 604 (2023), including human control, responsibility of human beings and legal persons for consequences, and transparency and traceability of autonomous decision-making and actions.
Terminology is foundational to that work. Legal, technical, risk, governance, and operational participants need sufficiently precise language to distinguish recommendation from execution, permission from present authority, evaluation from enforcement, and governance intent from controls that actually operate before consequence.
A Common Language for Runtime Governance
The Runtime Governance Body of Knowledge for Artificial Intelligence and Other Autonomous Systems — Glossary defines core terminology used within the AGCP runtime-governance body of knowledge.
The glossary was developed to support consistent use of terminology across training, assessment, architecture, implementation, standards alignment, and conformance activities. Its central premise is that precise language matters because technically distinct governance concepts are often treated as though they were interchangeable.
That distinction becomes especially important when autonomous or AI-enabled systems can produce operational consequence. Terms such as authorization, authority, approval, execution, commitment, enforcement, evidence, admissibility, policy, and governance describe different functions and should not be collapsed into a single concept.
The contribution therefore provides a terminology layer connecting legal and governance intent with architecture, system implementation, runtime control, evidence, assurance, and conformance.
Similar Words Can Describe Very Different Governance Functions
The glossary is built around distinctions that determine whether governance is merely described or actually operates before a consequential state transition becomes real.
Proposed Transition vs. Execution
A proposed transition describes a candidate mutation of system state submitted for governance evaluation. Execution is the operational realization of a transition after the required governance and commitment processes have succeeded. A request, recommendation, or tool call is not itself execution.
Admissibility vs. Binding
Admissibility concerns whether a proposed transition satisfies applicable governance conditions under current state. Governance binding preserves the relationship between that proposal and the authority, evidence, target, policy, state basis, and other conditions under which it may proceed.
Authorization vs. Authority at Commitment
Authorization can provide a permission input or prior decision. Authority at commitment is proposal-specific and depends on whether applicable authority and other governance conditions remain valid under current state at the point where the transition seeks to proceed toward commitment.
Evaluation vs. Enforcement
Evaluation determines a governance result. Enforcement determines whether that result can actually prevent or permit operational consequence. A system that evaluates governance but cannot control the execution path does not provide complete runtime governance within that claimed scope.
Vocabulary Across the Runtime-Governance Lifecycle
The glossary contains more than one hundred defined concepts spanning authority, state, evidence, policy, execution, assurance, architecture, lifecycle, distributed governance, and conformance.
Authority & Authorization
Terms distinguish general permission from proposal-specific authority that remains valid under current conditions.
- authority
- authority at commitment
- authorization
- authorization artifact
- commit-bound authorization
- delegation
- approval
- quorum
Proposal, Commit & Execution
Terms separate proposed changes from the governance and execution stages through which a change becomes operationally real.
- proposal
- proposed transition
- governed action proposal
- commit authorization
- commit boundary
- commit enforcement
- commitment
- execution
Evidence & Provenance
Governance decisions depend on evidence that is relevant, current, attributable, sufficiently complete, and traceably connected to the decision context.
- evidence
- evidence integrity
- evidence continuity
- evidence sufficiency
- qualified runtime evidence
- provenance
- governance lineage
- governance receipt
Policy & Governance Compilation
Policy expresses governance intent; runtime governance requires that applicable intent be translated into machine-evaluable and enforceable representations.
- policy
- policy decision point
- policy enforcement point
- policy-to-execution translation
- governance compilation
- constitutional validation
- controlled activation
- governance constitution
Assurance & Conformance
Governance claims should be supported by observable, testable, reconstructable evidence within a defined scope.
- assessment
- assurance
- runtime assurance
- governance assurance
- operating effectiveness
- replayability
- conformance
- conformance assessor
Distributed & Composite Governance
Multi-agent, cross-system, and composite workflows require terminology for dependencies, ordering, partial commitment, and governance continuity across boundaries.
- composite proposal
- governed sub-transition
- governance dependency
- governance dependency graph
- composite-bind integrity
- partial-bind admissibility
- governance continuity
- deterministic adjudication
Concepts at the Center of Runtime Governance
These selected concepts illustrate the vocabulary used to distinguish governance intent, runtime decision-making, commitment, enforcement, evidence, and operational consequence.
Runtime Governance
The execution-time discipline of determining whether a proposed AI-enabled, autonomous, agentic, or programmatic action may become operationally real under current authority, evidence, policy, constraints, invariants, and canonical-state conditions.
Proposed Transition
A candidate mutation of system state. It is the object evaluated by runtime governance and should not be treated as though the proposed change has already executed.
Canonical State
The authoritative governance representation of system reality against which proposed transitions are evaluated, distinct from local application state, runtime context, or an agent’s internal belief.
Authority
The runtime basis for allowing a specific proposed transition to proceed. Authority is proposal-specific and depends on current governance conditions rather than functioning as a universally portable permission.
Authority at Commitment
The derived runtime condition establishing whether a specific proposed transition is presently permitted to proceed toward commit authorization under current governance conditions.
Commit Boundary
The enforceable interface at which the final governance decision is applied and a proposed transition is either permitted to mutate authoritative operational state or prevented from doing so.
Commitment
The successful application of an authorized transition to authoritative operational state, making the transition part of the system’s operational reality.
Enforcement
The prevention or allowance of operational consequence according to a governance decision. Effective enforcement requires control over the relevant execution path.
Non-Bypassability
The property that every execution path capable of producing a governed consequence within a defined scope is necessarily mediated by the required governance evaluation and enforcement mechanisms.
Structural Refusal
An enforceable governance outcome in which an inadmissible, unauthorized, stale, mismatched, insufficiently evidenced, or invariant-violating proposal is prevented from becoming operationally real.
Governance Compilation
The engineering process through which human governance intent is transformed into validated, deployable, machine-evaluable governance configurations for runtime evaluation and enforcement.
Runtime Assurance
Transition-specific assurance, supported by evidence, that governance operated at the point of action before a proposed transition became operational consequence.
From Reasoning to Operational Consequence
The glossary gives distinct names to stages that can otherwise be blurred together in discussions of AI agents and automation.
Governance vocabulary tracks where responsibility and control change.
A reasoning system may produce a recommendation, candidate action, tool request, or other proposed transition. That proposal can then be evaluated against current governance conditions, bound to its evidence and authority basis, subjected to commitment decisions, enforced at the applicable boundary, and only then realized as operational execution.
Terminology Supports More Than Documentation
Consistent terminology creates a shared semantic foundation for multidisciplinary governance work.
Architecture
Give architects precise terms for describing proposal formation, governance evaluation, decision points, enforcement points, state, commitment, execution, and evidence.
Implementation
Reduce ambiguity when legal and governance requirements are translated into schemas, policies, controls, interfaces, services, and execution mechanisms.
Assessment
Provide assessors with terminology for distinguishing design claims from operating effectiveness, non-bypassability, evidence sufficiency, refusal behavior, and replayability.
Standards Alignment
Establish precise concepts that can be compared and mapped to external governance, cybersecurity, risk-management, assurance, and autonomous-systems frameworks.
Conformance
Support evidence-based determination of whether implementations satisfy defined requirements, expected behaviors, test cases, and evidence criteria within a stated scope.
Professional Education
Give legal, risk, technical, governance, audit, assurance, and operational professionals a common vocabulary for discussing systems capable of consequential action.
View the Glossary in Its ABA Working-Group Context
The American Bar Association’s Autonomous Systems Governance Working Group maintains a Proposed Lexicon page where proposed terminology and reference glossaries can be viewed in the broader working-group context.
Sustainable Future Tech separately preserves the July 19, 2026 glossary PDF as part of its institutional record of contributions to external governance, professional, standards, and policy processes.
This discussion draft does not currently use a Zenodo DOI record. The ASG-WG proposed-lexicon page provides the external institutional context, while the SFT-hosted PDF preserves the submitted reference artifact.
Status, Attribution, and Provenance
This page documents the July 19, 2026 Runtime Governance Body of Knowledge Glossary authored by John M. Willis through AGCP.ai, an initiative of Sustainable Future Tech, Inc., and contributed through the American Bar Association’s Autonomous Systems Governance Working Group (ASG-WG) terminology discussion process.
The ASG-WG operates through ABA committee structures as a joint effort of the SciTech Risk and Trust Management Committee and the Cyber and Technology Committee of the ABA Business Law Section. The ASG-WG proposed-lexicon page provides the external institutional context for this and other terminology materials.
Publication or inclusion of a reference glossary within that proposed-lexicon process does not establish adoption, endorsement, approval, or official terminology by ASG-WG, the American Bar Association, an ABA section, or an ABA committee.
Sustainable Future Tech maintains this page as an institutional contribution record and preserves the SFT-hosted PDF as an archival copy of the July 19, 2026 discussion draft.
Runtime-governance terminology continues to develop through AGCP and Runtime Governance Engineering research, architecture, specifications, Bodies of Knowledge, assessment, and conformance work. Later authoritative terminology may therefore clarify, refine, or supersede wording contained in this historical discussion draft.