Trace-Representable Governance for Autonomous Agents: Volume IV — Formal Constraints, Secure Handshakes, and Safe Refusal

This manuscript is Volume IV of The Unified Field Theory of Autonomous Governance, a series formalizing the thermodynamic constraints of artificial intelligence. This manuscript presents a formal framework for trace-representable governance in autonomous agent systems. The paper defines agent constitutions as explicit constraint sets over admissible executions, introduces a secure bilateral handshake protocol for pre-commit validation, and specifies safe refusal semantics as a first-class terminal outcome rather than an exception path. The framework is designed to support policy-constrained coordination, provenance-preserving commitments, and auditable refusal under explicit assumptions about authentication, policy evaluation, and trace observability. Version 2 substantially revises and matures the earlier manuscript by narrowing the contribution to a refereeable protocol paper, replacing broader manifesto-style framing with a formal model, protocol state machine, theorem-style guarantees, and a prototype evaluation design. The manuscript also expands its related-work positioning across formal methods, secure protocols, runtime verification, and multi-agent governance. This Zenodo record contains the Version 2 manuscript source and compiled manuscript files for archival citation and versioned reference.