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The paper introduces Arbiter-K, a novel execution architecture for agentic AI systems that prioritizes governance by encapsulating the LLM as a Probabilistic Processing Unit within a deterministic kernel. This kernel uses a Semantic ISA to transform probabilistic messages into discrete instructions, enabling runtime construction of an Instruction Dependency Graph and active taint propagation for enhanced security. Evaluations on OpenClaw and NanoBot demonstrate Arbiter-K's ability to intercept unsafe trajectories with significantly improved efficacy compared to native policies.
Agentic AI's fragility stems from relying on LLMs for system control, but Arbiter-K flips the script by using a deterministic kernel to govern the LLM, achieving up to 95% unsafe action interception.
The transition of agentic AI from brittle prototypes to production systems is stalled by a pervasive crisis of craft. We suggest that the prevailing orchestration paradigm-delegating the system control loop to large language models and merely patching with heuristic guardrails-is the root cause of this fragility. Instead, we propose Arbiter-K, a Governance-First execution architecture that reconceptualizes the underlying model as a Probabilistic Processing Unit encapsulated by a deterministic, neuro-symbolic kernel. Arbiter-K implements a Semantic Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to reify probabilistic messages into discrete instructions. This allows the kernel to maintain a Security Context Registry and construct an Instruction Dependency Graph at runtime, enabling active taint propagation based on the data-flow pedigree of each reasoning node. By leveraging this mechanism, Arbiter-K precisely interdicts unsafe trajectories at deterministic sinks (e.g., high-risk tool calls or unauthorized network egress) and enables autonomous execution correction and architectural rollback when security policies are triggered. Evaluations on OpenClaw and NanoBot demonstrate that Arbiter-K enforces security as a microarchitectural property, achieving 76% to 95% unsafe interception for a 92.79% absolute gain over native policies. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cure-lab/ArbiterOS.