Deterministic Dual-Gate Governance for Agentic AI. Minimal Stability Conditions and Practical Enforcement Architecture.

Chimera is a deterministic external governance layer designed to wrap around agentic AI systems without modifying their internal reasoning. The paper introduces a minimal and provably irreducible stability hierarchy (S0–S3), eight hard invariants (I1–I8), and seven architectural conditions (C1–C7) necessary for safe autonomous execution. Unlike alignment-based approaches, Chimera enforces dual-gate authorization, fail-closed behavior, immutable audit, and governance non-self-modifiability. A proof-of-concept integration with OpenClaw demonstrates additive governance wrapping without invasive system modification. The framework defines governance stability as a structural property of execution authority rather than model intelligence.