Five runtime primitives for governing agents, and an explicit accounting of what enforcement costs

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A 27 August position paper argues enterprise agent governance is a runtime problem rather than an alignment or build-time one, because agent principals are ephemeral, their action set is model-selected rather than programmed, and the population is discovered rather than provisioned since anyone with API access can create one. It derives five primitives (discovery, identity, governance, attestation, supply chain), states what fails without each and why the others cannot substitute, and describes an implementation that mediates each action against policy before effect, authorizes it against a per-tenant action vocabulary, and records it in a hash-linked signed ledger a third party can verify without the vendor. Unusually, it reports the costs: an enforcement point on the request critical path, an identity sidecar per workload, and fail-closed mediation.