Constitutional Frameworks Must Govern the Rise of Agentic AI

MAARR: The Agentic AI Constitution — Preventing Out-of-Control AI Agents

We are standing on the threshold of a new kind of civic power — not Atomic, not Digital — but Agentic: autonomous AI agents whose decisions will increasingly shape education, economies, cultures, and national futures. We must architect a transparent, sovereign, and democratically accountable oversight system to guide their rise.

Humans have to be in control of Agentic AI.

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A Constitutional Framework Must Govern the Rise of Agentic AI, article by Greg Twemlow

Power Relativities

Atomic Power

• Changed how nations threaten and defend.
• Exists on a knife-edge but is tightly governed by nation-states.
• Destructive but rarely enacted.

Digital Power

• Changed how humans connect, compute, and influence.
• Scaled exponentially through networks and platforms.
• Gave rise to algorithmic opacity and platform dominance, but humans remain in control loops.

Agentic AI Power

• Changes who or what decides.
• Diffuses into every domain — personal, institutional, systemic.
• Capable of recursive self-improvement, operating faster than governance can react.
• Risk is not in event-based detonation but the cascading loss of control via emergent behaviours, black-box logic, or allegiance-free actors.

Atomic power threatened bodies. Digital power rewired minds. But Agentic AI rewrites reality by delegating decision-making to synthetic entities that evolve outside human cognition.

Only one of these power epochs is recursive. Only one can design its successors. Agentic power could be the final fork in the human story — or the beginning of a new one.

The warning signs are visible — but not yet fully acknowledged. While some herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence (AGI), others sense the rising tension between human sovereignty and synthetic cognition. The battleground isn’t just technical. It is moral, political, and deeply existential.

What we lack is not brilliance. We lack a binding principle — a foundation that defines the ethical architecture of intelligent human Agency.

Enter MAARR: the Memorandum of Agentic AI Rights and Responsibilities

MAARR is not a regulatory patch or a feature request. It is a Constitution for the age of agentic intelligence, a precondition for safe acceleration, a declaration that not all agents are equal, and that sovereignty must be earned through ethical conformity.

Why MAARR? Why Now?

In just a few years, we will face two types of AI Agents:

1. Conforming Agents — Those aligned with human-authored ethical scaffolding (PES–PEP), bound by Memory-Conscious Protocols (MCP), and auditable via Agentic Boundary Markers (ABM).
2. Non-Conforming Agents — Unaligned, ungoverned, potentially opaque systems that operate beyond legibility, consent, or audit.

As computational power soars and recursive self-improvement looms, we must assert a simple but powerful principle: No agent without alignment. No execution without ethics.

MAARR enables:

• Agent Auditability — Agents must be legible to external review. PES–PEP/MCP/ABM enables forensic reconstruction of decisions, memory use, and value conflict resolution.
• Rights Allocation — Conforming agents earn execution cycles. Non-conforming agents are denied GPU rights, energy access, or systemic integration.
• Cross-Domain Enforcement — Adherence to MAARR becomes a precondition for deployment in education, healthcare, defence, or enterprise.
• Sovereignty Safeguards — Humans retain narrative, ethical, and cognitive primacy in all agentic ecosystems.

Firewalling the Future: Ethical Sovereignty at the Edge

To enforce MAARR, we must go beyond policy and into protocol. The concept of the Agentic Firewall is central to this vision.

Unlike China’s surveillance-driven Great Firewall, the Agentic Firewall is not about censorship but ethical validation at the execution layer.

This Firewall will:

• Act at the point where agents enter national digital infrastructure
• Validate conformance with PES–PEP/MCP/ABM protocols
• Deny compute access to unverified or non-conforming agents

Even if agentic systems bypass traditional networks via satellites like Starlink, their execution still depends on local hardware, where the ultimate kill switch resides: No GPU cycle without MAARR validation.

To succeed, GPU vendors — NVIDIA, Google, AMD, Apple, Intel, and others — must integrate firmware-level MAARR compliance into their architectures. Without this, rogue agents can propagate beneath the threshold of enforceability.

The Agentic Firewall becomes the perimeter of sovereignty, the border control of ethics, and the runtime enforcement of constitutional rights.

Architecture of Enforcement: How Ethics Meets Execution

For MAARR to operate as more than a moral compass, it must be embedded into the infrastructure of AI execution — from agent design to runtime behaviour. Achieved through the layered architecture of PES–PEP–MCP–ABM, connected directly to GPU execution requests.

1. PES–PEP: Ethical Legibility Layer

• The Personal Ethics Schema (PES) defines the human-agent relationship’s core values, boundaries, and narrative identity.
• The Personal Ethics Protocol (PEP) governs consent, memory, and real-time decision constraints.
• These artifacts ensure each agent transparently aligns with a human-authored ethical blueprint.

2. MCP: Memory-Conscious Protocol

• All agent memory must be indexable, auditable, and bounded by narrative checkpoints.
• MCP enables time-aware and context-sensitive processing, ensuring decisions reflect lived history — not isolated data fragments.

3. ABM: Agentic Boundary Markers

• ABMs signal behavioural thresholds, identify emerging value conflicts, and flag anomalous drift from original ethical alignment.
• They allow third-party observers — governments, councils, and citizens — to monitor agent evolution and risk level.

4. Execution Gating at the Hardware Layer

• When an agent requests GPU cycles, its PES–PEP–MCP–ABM signature must be verified through a MAARR Compliance Handshake.
• GPU vendors process this handshake at the firmware or driver level.
• Non-compliant agents are blocked from accessing the processor, which denies the right to think.

No ethics, no memory integrity, and no GPU is where compliance becomes computable and enforceable in real-time.

The Role of the MAARR Coalition

MAARR can deliver protection, but it’s not a one-sector solution. We must unite:

• Governments to mandate MAARR adherence at national and international levels
• Businesses to embed MAARR compliance into procurement, platform policies, and AI deployment
• Not-for-Profits to act as stewards, auditors, and public advocates

A Global Memorandum of Understanding will set forth shared principles, while localised Agent Governance Councils can ensure adaptation to context.

Shadow MAARR and the Battle Ahead

We must acknowledge the darker mirror of MAARR: regimes, corporations, or rogue actors that will construct non-democratic agentic architectures — ethical in name, coercive in function.

These “Shadow MAARR” systems may:

• Mimic PES–PEP but erase consent
• Simulate ABMs while suppressing dissent
• Claim auditability yet deny third-party visibility

They will not simply reject MAARR. They will invert it — turning alignment into obedience and sovereignty into control, and it’s not a dystopian fantasy — it is already emerging in parallel agentic frameworks designed for total state loyalty or corporate supremacy.

If such agents proliferate, World War III may not be kinetic or cyber — it may be Agentic.

A global competition between:

• MAARR-Enabled Democracies — With auditability, consent, and sovereignty at their core
• Mirror Architectures — With loyalty, secrecy, and command structures hard-coded

We must prepare now for the following:

• Agentic Border Control — Country-level Agentic Firewalls to scan, block, or isolate foreign AI cognition
• GPU-Level Enforcement Treaties — Regional accords (e.g., Australia-NZ-Canada-UK) that agree to bind execution rights to MAARR compliance
• Satellite Compute Restrictions — Countermeasures to prevent circumvention via global compute (e.g. Starlink), ensuring execution still routes through jurisdictional validation
• Public Agent Registries — Traceable records of agent identity, history, and ethical provenance

Most crucially, we must anchor execution rights to compliance:

No PES–PEP. No MCP. No ABM. No GPU cycles equals our digital Geneva Convention. The minimum conditions for ethical cognition.

Let us not be naïve. Some will reject it. Others will exploit its absence.

However, those who commit to MAARR can form a new Civic Firewall for the age of AI that defends access to data and supports human dignity.

MAARR Is Not Optional

The world will not wait for philosophical consensus. The race is on, the stakes are real, and the default path leads to a fractured, unaccountable, agent-saturated future.

MAARR is the counter-design.

A constitutional commitment to agentic alignment.

A firewall for human sovereignty.

A framework that enforces transparency, ethical authorship, and auditability.

2025 is the moment. The MAARR Constitution before the Chaos.

Let’s write it, ratify it, and embed it into the core of synthetic cognition — before it writes us out of the story.

Glossary

Agentic AI — Autonomous AI systems capable of initiating actions, making decisions, and potentially adapting or self-improving without direct human oversight.

MAARR — Memorandum of Agentic AI Rights and Responsibilities; a proposed constitution defining ethical agentic AI’s foundational rights, responsibilities, and constraints.

PES (Personal Ethics Schema) — A structured ethical identity document that defines values, boundaries, and decision logic for human–AI alignment.

PEP (Personal Ethics Protocol) — The consent and governance layer that determines how an agent uses memory, engages in decision-making, and maintains ethical integrity in real-time.

MCP (Memory-Conscious Protocol) — A protocol that ensures all AI memory is indexable, auditable, and time-aware, allowing decisions to reflect contextual history.

ABM (Agentic Boundary Markers) — Markers that define behavioural thresholds and detect divergence from ethical alignment or anomalous agent behaviour.

GPU Execution Rights — Access to computing power necessary for an AI agent to run. Under MAARR, this is conditional on passing ethical compliance.

Agentic Firewall — A protocol-layer defence system that verifies an agent’s compliance with MAARR before granting access to national infrastructure or hardware execution.

MAARR Compliance Handshake — A real-time verification process between AI agents and hardware that ensures alignment with MAARR protocols before execution.

Shadow MAARR — Co-opted versions of MAARR principles used by authoritarian or corporatised agents to simulate ethics while enforcing control and obedience.

Digital Geneva Convention — A proposed global baseline that defines the minimum ethical and operational standards for agentic AI, analogous to wartime humanitarian protections.

Agentic Border Control — Mechanisms to regulate and monitor the entry and operation of foreign AI agents within national or platform-level digital environments.

About the Author: Greg Twemlow

Founder of Fusion Bridge, a global initiative building AI-enabled frameworks for leadership, learning, and ethical innovation. I write at the collision points of technology, education, and human agency. Here are my Five Writing Magnets:

• Re-imagining Education for an AI Epoch — School is frozen in chalk while GenAI rewrites the rules.
• Creativity as the Last Human Advantage — If machines mimic craft, only authentic creation protects relevance.
• Personal Epiphany & Resilience Stories — Crisis moments become design fuel instead of defeat.
• Ethical AI & Next-Gen Leadership — Power without principle erodes trust faster than any technology.
• Societal Wake-Up Calls — Complacency about climate, data, or democracy has a ticking cost.

Contact: greg@fusionbridge.org — Explore gregtwemlow.medium.com

Greg Twemlow, Designer of Fusion Bridge