Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance

2026-05-16

AI Summary

Current AI agents lack a quantifiable, traceable, and intervenable provenance mechanism, making it difficult to assign responsibility when harm occurs. This work proposes the first explicit provenance framework that spans the entire agent lifecycle, establishing explicit provenance as a structural prerequisite for responsible AI. The framework introduces a four-dimensional accountability provenance system—capturing “why,” “what,” “how,” and “who”—and integrates causal attribution modeling with responsibility tensor representations to enable computable and online-intervenable provenance across four lifecycle stages. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the system can effectively estimate and intervene on provenance information before irreversible harm occurs, offering a viable technical pathway for AI accountability.

Abstract

Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and unenforced concept, as no current agentic framework produces the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance needed to assign it when harm emerges from compositions no single party designed. We position that what is missing is not better benchmark-level evaluation but $\textbf{explicit provenance}$ across the full agentic lifecycle, which is the only viable basis for making responsibility computable and actionable. We advance this agenda along four axes: establishing $\textit{why}$ such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing $\textit{what}$ it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing $\textit{how}$ it can be made computable across four lifecycle layers with preliminary experiments showing that provenance is estimable and interveneable online before irreversible harm accumulates, and examining $\textit{who}$ bears responsibility through a concrete agentic incident. Explicit provenance is not a discretionary refinement but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, and no stakeholder across its ecosystem can afford to treat it as optional.

Problem

• Agentic AI
• Responsibility
• Provenance
• Causal Attribution
• Accountability

Innovation

• explicit provenance
• agentic AI
• responsibility tensor
• causal attribution
• computable responsibility