Reconstructive Authority Model: Runtime Execution Validity Under Partial Observability

Abstract

Autonomous systems increasingly operate under partial observability where execution-relevant state is never fully accessible. Existing governance mechanisms -- trusted execution environments, oracle-signed state proofs, cryptographic attestation -- enforce the integrity of computation and state projections. We show this is structurally insufficient: an authenticated projection of state is necessary but never sufficient for execution validity. We introduce the Reconstructive Authority Model (RAM), which separates integrity from coverage. RAM defines a reconstruction gate that reasons over an explicit coverage envelope -- comprising proven state, declared assumptions, and an acknowledged unobservable residual -- and permits execution only when coverage is adequate for the action class. When coverage is insufficient, RAM narrows privileges dynamically or fails closed. Attestation proves trust in measurement; RAM proves adequacy of what is measured. We formalize RAM, prove necessity via two theorems (attestation insufficiency and RAM necessity) and three corollaries, and present a hybrid RAM+Attestation architecture with privilege-narrowing. Synthetic experiments (N=100,000, seed=42) show RAM achieves zero invalid execution rates at all coverage levels. Attestation-based systems exhibit IER=0.423 at low coverage and IER=0.233 even at full coverage, the latter arising from undefined-state handling failures undetectable by integrity checks alone. This reframes execution validity as a coverage reconstruction problem, distinct from and complementary to integrity guarantees provided by attestation.