AI Social Responsibility as Reachability: Execution-Level Semantics for the Social Responsibility Stack

TL;DR

This paper formalizes social responsibility in AI systems as a reachability problem within execution trajectories, using Petri nets to ensure responsible behavior in complex, feedback-driven environments.

Contribution

It introduces a formal foundation for the Social Responsibility Stack based on reachability semantics and employs Petri nets to operationalize responsibility in autonomous systems.

Findings

Responsibility is modeled as a reachability property of system execution.

Petri nets encode responsibility constraints and enable monitoring of inadmissible states.

Embedding reachability in SRS internalizes responsibility as a structural invariant.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly embedded as persistent, closed-loop components within cyber-physical, social, and institutional processes. Rather than producing isolated outputs, such systems operate continuously under feedback, adaptation, and scale, reshaping physical flows, human behavior, and institutional practice over time. In these settings, socially unacceptable outcomes rarely arise from singular faults or explicit policy violations. Instead, they emerge through cumulative execution trajectories enabled by repetition, concurrency, and feedback. This paper advances the formal foundation of the Social Responsibility Stack (SRS) by making its central requirement explicit: responsibility is fundamentally a reachability property of system execution. A system is responsible iff its execution semantics prevent entry into inadmissible global configurations, regardless of local performance gains or optimization objectives. Responsibility failures are therefore not objective-level errors, but execution-level failures of trajectory control. To operationalize this perspective, we introduce Petri nets as an execution-level formalism for responsible autonomous systems. We show how SRS value commitments correspond to forbidden markings, safeguards to structural constraints on transition firing, auditing to monitoring of reachability pressure, and governance to legitimate modification of execution structure. Embedding Petri-net reachability within the SRS architecture internalizes responsibility as a structural invariant rather than an external objective or post-hoc mechanism. These results establish the Social Responsibility Stack as an executable responsibility architecture and position reachability-based execution semantics as a necessary foundation for responsible autonomy in feedback-rich cyber-physical and socio-technical systems.