Project PULSE: A Goal -Governance Protocol for Autonomous Agentic Systems

As autonomous agentic systems evolve from short-lived tasks toward persistent, multi-agent workflows, maintaining objective continuity becomes an increasingly important governance consideration. We present Project PULSE (Protocol for Universal Lifecycle and State Evaluation), a conceptual goal-governance framework designed to preserve human agency over the intent an agentic system pursues, as distinct from the actions it is permitted to take. PULSE is proposed as an external, implementation-agnostic governance layer intended to detect potential objective drift while preserving legitimate adaptive reasoning, ensuring that objective transitions remain explicit, human-authorized, and auditable. We position PULSE relative to recent runtime governance frameworks and argue that its distinct contribution is not a new detection mechanism, but a governance philosophy: a small set of invariants that treat user intent, rather than system risk or access control, as the central object of governance.