Constitutional Exception Committees: A Pattern for AI Agent Constraint Governance
Elia “Airtis” Shmuelovitch
The Problem You've built an autonomous AI agent. You've given it constraints—readonly rules it cannot modify. One rule might be: "Never auto-clear the human pause flag." Good. That prevents runaway behavior. But now a legitimate edge case appears. The human explicitly grants authority for one specific action that would violate the constraint. The agent is stuck: Option A : Read around its own doctrine (doctrine becomes meaningless) Option B : Stay paralyzed (constraint defeats legitimate need) O