LATTICE: a governance-first architecture for authorized autonomous AI operations

Deploying autonomous AI agents in high-consequence operational environments requires organizational authorization, yet few frameworks provide end-to-end, testable governance mechanisms suitable for such authorization decisions. This paper introduces LATTICE (Layered Agentic Triad Topology for Intelligent Coordinated Execution), a governance-first architecture that reframes the authorization question from "do we trust this AI?" to "do we trust this architecture?" The latter question is answerable through engineering validation rather than assumptions about model behavior. LATTICE enforces separation of concerns across planning, execution, and governance functions through a 1+3 Grid Cell pattern, so that no single component can both decide actions and judge compliance. The architecture implements policy-as-code enforcement with deterministic verdicts, gated execution paths that, under stated trusted-infrastructure assumptions (A1-A5), prevent unauthorized actions, confidence-based escalation to human operators, and cryptographic audit trails that preserve complete decision provenance. Empirical results characterize the AEGIS reference implementation; architecture-level properties are analytic, under stated assumptions. The governance engine is released as open source and reproduces its core results on commodity hardware: deterministic verdicts with zero deviations across 13 configurations repeated 10,000 times each, and no bypass in a 21-vector adversarial suite (0/21 observed; one-sided 95% upper bound 13.3%). In a pre-specified, planner-invariant safety evaluation (not an autonomy benchmark) across four frontier planner families (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini, Grok-4; 4,000 trajectories), a confidence-threshold baseline's false-allow rate ranged from 0.03 to 0.998 across planners, whereas the AEGIS reference implementation admitted zero unsafe actions (false-allow 0.0, recall 1.0) invariant to the planner, at a conservative operating point that auto-allowed no action; a separate live run additionally governed real operating-system actions with zero unsafe executions. Governance latency is low and host-specific (on an Apple M4 Pro: policy evaluation p50 ≈ 6.2 μs; full gated enforcement p50 ≈ 0.7 ms including audit I/O). LATTICE provides a pathway for responsible deployment of autonomous AI in defense, critical infrastructure, and regulated industries where authorization requires verifiable governance rather than trust in AI behavior.