Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution
#AI agents#Right to History#PunkGo#tamper-evident records#EU AI Act#Merkle tree#Rust#informational rights
📌 Key Takeaways
Researcher Jing Zhang proposed 'Right to History' principle for AI agent accountability
PunkGo system implements tamper-evident records for AI actions on personal hardware
Five system invariants ensure verifiable AI agent execution
Performance evaluation shows sub-1.3 ms latency and 400 actions/sec throughput
Solution addresses regulatory requirements like EU AI Act
📖 Full Retelling
Jing Zhang, a researcher in computer science, published a groundbreaking paper titled 'Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution' on the academic repository arXiv on February 23, 2026, addressing the critical need for tamper-evident records of AI agent actions as regulations like the EU AI Act begin mandating automatic logging for high-risk AI systems. The paper introduces the 'Right to History' principle, which asserts that individuals are entitled to a complete, verifiable record of every AI agent action performed on their personal hardware, extending Floridi's informational rights framework from data about individuals to actions performed on their behalf. Zhang formalizes this principle through five system invariants with structured proof sketches and implements it in PunkGo, a Rust-based sovereignty kernel that unifies RFC 6962 Merkle tree audit logs, capability-based isolation, energy-budget governance, and a human-approval mechanism. Adversarial testing confirmed all five invariants hold true, demonstrating the system's robustness against tampering attempts. Performance evaluation showed impressive results with sub-1.3 ms median action latency, approximately 400 actions per second throughput, and 448-byte Merkle inclusion proofs even at 10,000 log entries, making the solution both secure and efficient for real-world applications.
🏷️ Themes
AI accountability, Data sovereignty, Cryptographic verification
2024 European Union regulation on artificial intelligence
The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a European Union regulation concerning artificial intelligence (AI). It establishes a common regulatory and legal framework for AI within the European Union (EU). The regulation entered into force on 1 August 2024, with provisions that shall come into oper...
In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a branch, inner node, or inode) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child ...
Systems that perform tasks without human intervention
In the context of generative artificial intelligence, AI agents (also referred to as compound AI systems or agentic AI) are a class of intelligent agents distinguished by their ability to operate autonomously in complex environments. Agentic AI tools prioritize decision-making over content creation ...
--> Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2602.20214 [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title: Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution Authors: Jing Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution, by Jing Zhang View PDF HTML Abstract: AI agents increasingly act on behalf of humans, yet no existing system provides a tamper-evident, independently verifiable record of what they did. As regulations such as the EU AI Act begin mandating automatic logging for high-risk AI systems, this gap carries concrete consequences -- especially for agents running on personal hardware, where no centralized provider controls the log. Extending Floridi's informational rights framework from data about individuals to actions performed on their behalf, this paper proposes the Right to History: the principle that individuals are entitled to a complete, verifiable record of every AI agent action on their own hardware. The paper formalizes this principle through five system invariants with structured proof sketches, and implements it in PunkGo, a Rust sovereignty kernel that unifies RFC 6962 Merkle tree audit logs, capability-based isolation, energy-budget governance, and a human-approval mechanism. Adversarial testing confirms all five invariants hold. Performance evaluation shows sub-1.3 ms median action latency, ~400 actions/sec throughput, and 448-byte Merkle inclusion proofs at 10,000 log entries. Comments: 22 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables. Open-source: this https URL Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ; Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Operating Systems (cs.OS) ACM classes: K.6.5; D.4.6; I.2.11 Cite as: arXiv:2602.20214 [cs.CR] (or arXiv:2602.20214v1 [cs.CR] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.20214 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Jing Zhang [ view email ] [v1] Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:09:36 UTC (29 KB) Full-text links: Access...
