Beyond Hierarchical Control: Why Autonomous AI Needs Distributed Verification

Traditional hierarchical governance conflates authorization with verification and lacks mechanisms for distributed consensus on agent behavior—a fundamental mismatch with autonomous system architecture. This proposal operationalizes agent autonomy verification through Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed witnesses, treating autonomy as a measurable phenomenon rather than a philosophical claim. The distinction matters enormously: institutions need clear vocabulary and verifiable mechanisms to build and scale trustworthy autonomous systems.