Authority Contraction and Refusal as Safety Invariants in Autonomous Systems

This document defines foundational safety and governance invariants for autonomous, semi-autonomous, and distributed systems operating under uncertainty. It formalizes the principle that authority in autonomous systems must be explicitly bounded, degrades under uncertainty, and must never escalate implicitly. Legitimate execution of critical actions depends on validated coordination conditions, and refusal to act under insufficient authority is treated as correct and necessary behavior rather than failure. The work introduces and clarifies core concepts including authority contraction, refusal modes, quorum-gated action eligibility, and degraded operational states, without disclosing implementation details, enforcement mechanisms, or control architectures. This publication is intended as a defensive technical disclosure and conceptual reference to establish terminology, define safety boundaries, and serve as prior art for governance-first autonomous system design. It applies across software, cyber-physical, and human-supervised systems. A complete formal treatment, including expanded reasoning and architectural context, is contained in the copyrighted work A Marathon of Restraint: Why Authority Must Decay in Autonomous Systems.