CRSA-1: Compositional Runtime Safety Attestation Protocol for Multi-Principal AI Systems

No existing framework, standard, or protocol defines how safety certificates compose across model boundaries in multi-agent AI systems. CRSA-1 fills this gap.Production AI systems are no longer single-model deployments. Retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agentic workflows, ensemble systems, cascade routers, and mixture-of-agents architectures compose multiple models into systems where individual model safety does not imply system safety without additional guarantees. Regulatory frameworks—including the EU AI Act (enforcement August 2, 2026), NDAA FY2026 Sections 1512–1513, Colorado SB 24-205, and OMB M-25-21—implicitly require compositional safety evidence but provide no methodology for producing it. The harmonized standards under development by CEN-CENELEC JTC 21 address component-level requirements; none address compositional safety for multi-model systems.CRSA-1 defines five components for compositional safety attestation: (1) a safety certificate algebra providing formally defined composition operators—sequential, parallel, conditional (novel), and recursive (novel)—that derive system-level safety certificates from component-level certificates with bounded risk degradation; (2) a runtime attestation mechanism using cryptographic commitments within Entity Attestation Tokens (EAT, RFC 9711) at less than 0.1% latency overhead; (3) multi-principal isolation bounds extending the Stateful Isolation Law's contamination functional to multi-model shared infrastructure via a contamination gain matrix and small gain condition; (4) a standardized audit log format built on W3C PROV-DM semantics with OCSF-compatible event classes; and (5) agent interaction protocol constraints specifying mandatory structured communication, anti-steganography requirements, cascade-breaking checkpoints, privilege boundary enforcement, and an MCP governance extension.Four conformance levels (C0 Documented through C3 Sovereign) provide a graduated adoption path mapped to specific regulatory deadlines across EU, US federal, and US state jurisdictions. The specification is positioned as the compositional safety layer within the Auburn Governance Stack (Clause AI-9, Document 46, Composition Layer), extending MAI-1 single-model attestation to multi-model systems.CRSA-1 is infrastructure, not intelligence. It provides compositional risk reduction and accountability infrastructure—analogous to financial auditing, which certifies process compliance without guaranteeing future solvency. The Honest Framing (Section 9) specifies precisely what CRSA-1 cannot guarantee, including the fundamental incompleteness of compositional verification for stochastic systems.