Provenact names 'stale authorization' as the core failure of agent governance and defines policy-state serializability

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arXiv 2608.02764 (Aug 3) targets agents that issue refunds, reserve inventory, provision cloud resources and move money, where budgets, approval status and risk signals can change between the moment an action is authorized and the moment its effect lands. The authors define policy-state serializability — committed effects must be explainable as authorized against the policy state immediately before they occur — and build Provenact, a runtime that keeps policies as reviewable programs while coordinating the state and effects needed to preserve their decisions. A PostgreSQL-backed prototype prevented stale authorizations that baselines passing policy state as ordinary request context missed, and held delayed approvals without blocking unrelated work.