Agent communication protocols and the transport bindings that carry them (HTTP/SSE, WebSocket, and recent QUIC and Media-over-QUIC mappings for MCP) are designed to deliver messages reliably. None addresses whether a governance obligation carried by a message, such as a consent decision or a corrective welfare signal, survives a channel that is lossy, intermittent, or partitioned. Over such a channel a best-effort governance message can be silently dropped, leaving an agent acting without authorization or correction, with no party aware the signal was lost. Guaranteed delivery is impossible over an unreliable channel (the Two Generals Problem; the FLP result), and by the end-to-end argument the missing guarantee must be supplied at the endpoints, not by an intermediary queue. But a governance obligation whose loss carries asymmetric cost can declare a fail-safe polarity: a safe default the sender applies locally when delivery is not confirmed. That local fallback makes the problem tractable. We propose Abhyasa, a transport-agnostic framework that delivers governance obligations under a deliver-or-report guarantee. It lifts the custody-transfer mechanism of delay-tolerant networking from opaque bundles to governance obligations, pairs at-least-once delivery with idempotent application for effectively-once semantics, and adds a principal-side fail-safe that holds without a working reverse channel: every obligation under custody is applied, explicitly declined, or escalated to the principal, and none is silently lost. We instantiate the framework on two governance invariants from companion work, Anumati (consent) and Phala (welfare feedback), as extensions to the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and MCP, layering above transport bindings such as MCP-over-MOQT.
Ravi Kiran Kadaboina (Thu,) studied this question.