Governance-First Synthetic Cognitive Architecture: A Framework for Structured Decision Support in High-Stakes Environments

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence in professional and high-stakes environments has exposed a fundamental mismatch between how current systems are designed and what those environments require. Most deployed AI architectures are optimized for response generation, a design objective that prioritizes output fluency and apparent accuracy over reasoning transparency, decision integrity, and human authority. Governance in these systems is characteristically post-hoc: behavioral constraints are applied as correction layers after generation rather than embedded as execution conditions before it. This paper introduces a governance-first synthetic cognitive architecture designed to address this structural limitation. Rather than functioning as an autonomous response generator, the proposed framework operates as a bounded decision-support system in which all analytical processes are subordinate to human authority by architectural design rather than policy. The framework is organized around three core principles: pre-execution governance, structured reasoning output, and explicit uncertainty representation. A hierarchical control model, in which the human operator retains full authority over all system outputs, is embedded into the architecture as an execution condition rather than a post-processing layer. The contribution of this paper is conceptual and architectural. No empirical benchmarks are presented and no claims of clinical validation are made. The framework is proposed as a structured design approach with implications for AI development in research, clinical analysis, regulatory compliance, and other domains where ungoverned output carries significant risk. *Version 2 update: corrected and standardized reference entries, added formal EU AI Act citation (Regulation EU 2024/1689) with Article 12/13/14 mapping, aligned in-text citations with the reference list, and integrated Wachter et al. (2017) citation into body text.