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[2602.20214] Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution
Summary
This paper proposes the 'Right to History,' a principle ensuring individuals have a verifiable record of AI agent actions on personal hardware, addressing regulatory gaps in AI accountability.
Why It Matters
As AI systems increasingly operate autonomously, the need for accountability and transparency becomes critical, especially with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act. This paper offers a framework to ensure individuals can verify actions taken by AI agents, promoting trust and compliance in AI technologies.
Key Takeaways
- The 'Right to History' principle provides a framework for verifiable AI actions.
- The proposed system includes five invariants that ensure accountability.
- Implementation in PunkGo demonstrates practical performance metrics.
- Adversarial testing confirms the robustness of the proposed system.
- This framework aligns with regulatory requirements for AI transparency.
Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2602.20214 (cs) [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title:Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution Authors:Jing Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution, by Jing Zhang View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI agents increasingly act on behalf of humans, yet no existing system provides a tamper-evident, independently verifiable record of what they did. As regulations such as the EU AI Act begin mandating automatic logging for high-risk AI systems, this gap carries concrete consequences -- especially for agents running on personal hardware, where no centralized provider controls the log. Extending Floridi's informational rights framework from data about individuals to actions performed on their behalf, this paper proposes the Right to History: the principle that individuals are entitled to a complete, verifiable record of every AI agent action on their own hardware. The paper formalizes this principle through five system invariants with structured proof sketches, and implements it in PunkGo, a Rust sovereignty kernel that unifies RFC 6962 Merkle tree audit logs, capability-based isolation, energy-budget governance, and a human-approval mechanism. Adversarial testing confirms all five invariants hold. Performance evaluation shows sub-1.3 ms median action latency, ~400 actions/sec throughput, and 448-byte Merkle inclusion proofs at 10,0...