# A Black Box for Agentic Processes: Blockchain-Anchored Evidence for AI Agent Communication, Human Oversight, and GRC Audits

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04017 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04017/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 2 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Blockchain-Monitored Agentic AI Architecture for Trusted Perception-Reasoning-Action Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20985/) (2025)
- [From Cloud-Native to Trust-Native: A Protocol for Verifiable Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22077/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An Evidence Model for Agentic Processes: Evidence Claims, Trust Assumptions, and Policy Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08481/) (2026)
- [From Training to Escalation: Forensic Analysis and Local Recreation of RL/RLHF-Induced Privilege Escalation in AI Agents (CVE-2026-65616)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20437/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous AI agents increasingly communicate with other agents, invoke tools, exchange intermediate results, and request human approvals. These workflows create a new auditability problem: organizations must reconstruct what happened, when it happened, which agent or human was involved, which control or policy applied, and whether records were modified afterwards. Motivated by the 2026 OpenAI/Hugging Face incident, this position and architecture paper proposes a product- and vendor-neutral black-box architecture for agentic processes. The architecture creates blockchain-anchored cryptographic commitments for selected agent communications, human-in-the-loop approvals, tool calls, and process artifacts without placing sensitive content on-chain. We define an evidence model that distinguishes temporal anchoring and artifact integrity from event ordering, capture authenticity, authorized anchoring, and causal traceability. The latter properties require additional architectural controls. We then discuss practical use for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), including compliance testing, risk-based evidence selection, monitoring evidence streams, incident reconstruction, and regulatory reporting readiness under the EU AI Act, NIS2, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). This position and architecture paper does not present an empirical performance or security evaluation. The approach does not prevent agent misbehavior or prove semantic truth. Rather, it strengthens the evidentiary basis for later verification of critical process traces.