Provably Compliant Autonomous Actions: A Consensus Enforced, Dual Authority Certification Gate with Freshness Bound Per Action Proofs

Regulated organisations are increasingly required to demonstrate compliance not at the level of policy documents but at the level of individual actions — every message sent, decision made, or transaction executed. This paper presents a certification gate that sits at the egress boundary of a regulated firm's outbound actions and produces, for each action, an independently verifiable proof that it satisfied the applicable rules before it occurred. The gate composes a regulator-aligned policy baseline with a tenant-controlled overlay (stricter-wins), evaluates the result deterministically, and requires a role-typed quorum of signatures — including a mandatory client-held signer — committed to a Byzantine-fault-tolerant, tamper-evident ledger. We state six security properties (non-bypass, hash-binding, composed-policy admissibility, refusal-code completeness and soundness, consensus-time non-admit, and freshness-binding) such that a permit cannot be issued, forged, replayed against stale reference data, or bypassed without detection, and any party — including the regulator — can recompute the decision from public evidence rather than trusting the operator. We describe the threat model, a working reference implementation validated through coordinated red-team and blue-team review, deployment in observe and enforce modes, and an honest account of current maturity and residual trust assumptions.