When Instructions Stop Governing: Rethinking Control in AI Agents
Timothy M. Rogers
PAPER · v1.0 · 2026-09-17 · human
Formal Sciences Computer Science Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Abstract
Recent failures of AI-agent control become easier to understand—and potentially easier to design against—once control is reframed not as the presence of instructions, but as the preservation of which constraints actually govern an agent’s evolving activity.
Keywords
Hierarchical Relational Ontology AI-agent control Governing Constraints Semiotic logic