Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance

TL;DR

This paper argues that explicit, traceable provenance across the agentic AI lifecycle is essential for assigning responsibility and ensuring trust, moving beyond subjective responsibility discussions.

Contribution

It formalizes the concept of provenance as a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, and demonstrates its computability and intervention potential in agentic AI systems.

Findings

Provenance can be estimated and intervened online before harm occurs.

Explicit provenance addresses responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions.

Preliminary experiments show provenance is feasible to compute and use in practice.

Abstract

Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and unenforced concept, as no current agentic framework produces the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance needed to assign it when harm emerges from compositions no single party designed. We position that what is missing is not better benchmark-level evaluation but $\textbf{explicit provenance}$ across the full agentic lifecycle, which is the only viable basis for making responsibility computable and actionable. We advance this agenda along four axes: establishing $\textit{why}$ such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing $\textit{what}$ it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing $\textit{how}$ it can be made computable across four lifecycle layers with preliminary experiments showing that provenance is estimable and interveneable online before irreversible harm accumulates, and examining $\textit{who}$ bears responsibility through a concrete agentic incident. Explicit provenance is not a discretionary refinement but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, and no stakeholder across its ecosystem can afford to treat it as optional.