This paper develops risk-averse models to support system operators in planning and operating the electricity grid under uncertainty from renewable power generation. We incorporate financial risk hedging using conditional value at risk (CVaR) within a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework and propose efficient, exact solution methods for these models. In addition, we introduce a power reliability-oriented risk measure and present new, computationally efficient models for risk-averse grid planning and operations.
Agentic AI systems increasingly act through tools, sub-agents, and external services, but governance controls are still commonly attached to prompts, dashboards, or post-hoc documentation. This creates a structural mismatch in regulated settings: obligations that must constrain execution are often evaluated only after execution has occurred. We introduce SARC, a runtime governance architecture for tool-using agents that treats constraints as first-class specification objects alongside state, action space, and reward. A SARC specification declares each constraint's source, class, predicate, verification point, response protocol, and operating point, and compiles these into four enforcement sites in the agent loop: a Pre-Action Gate, an Action-Time Monitor, a Post-Action Auditor, and an Escalation Router. We formalize the minimal invariants required for specification-trace correspondence, show why finite reward penalties do not generally substitute for hard runtime constraints, and extend the architecture to multi-agent workflows through constraint propagation, authority intersection, and attribution-preserving trace trees. We implement a prototype audit checker and report a reproducible synthetic evaluation over 50 seeds comparing SARC against post-hoc audit, output filtering, workflow rules, and policy-as-code-only baselines on a procurement task. SARC executes zero hard-constraint violations under exact predicates; its declared PAA throttling response reduces soft-window overages by 89.5
Agentic systems act, so a defect in the evidence they retrieve becomes a wrong action with a currency cost. The most dangerous enterprise defects are metadata-borne: a stale price or a superseded record, perfectly well-formed in the payload and betrayed only by freshness, lineage, or provenance. Such a defect never enters the agent's context, and an agent cannot doubt data it cannot see. On a priced replenishment benchmark, a competent agent silently converts an injected metadata-borne defect into a costly action about 60
Agentic AI systems act through tools and sub-agents, yet the controls meant to bound their financial and environmental cost still sit on dashboards evaluated beside or after execution. Green SARC applies the SARC governance-by-architecture framework -- four enforcement sites in the agent loop -- to FinOps and GreenOps, contributing the theory of what to enforce and how to predict it. We report four policy-independent results. (i) The unconstrained "State Snowball" is $Θ(n^2)$ in loop depth; on 3,000 real multi-step plans (SWE-rebench) it holds on 100%, with median curvature $\hat{c}_2=216$ exceeding the linear-accretion prediction $p/2=134$ -- real plans accrete faster than the model. (ii) On real residuals the Normal-$σ$ gate under-covers (92% at nominal 95%); split-conformal calibration holds (95.2%). (iii) A soft Lagrangian penalty tuned to the budget in expectation breaches it on 91.5% of seeds; the architectural gate breaches 0%. (iv) Under binding budgets the gate's over-budget incidence is 0% on synthetic and real (BurstGPT) arrivals. End-to-end token/USD/carbon savings (47--55%) are real but policy-dependent in magnitude -- set by a scope-cap knob, not by gate rejections. The library is open-source, dependency-free, and ships a regeneration script for every cited number.
As generative AI commercializes, competitive advantage is shifting from one-time model training toward continuous inference, distribution, and routing. At the frontier, large-scale inference can function as cognitive infrastructure: a bottleneck input that downstream applications rely on to compete, controlled by firms that often compete downstream through integrated assistants, productivity suites, and developer tooling. Foreclosure risk is not limited to price. It can be executed through non-price discrimination (latency, throughput, error rates, context limits, feature gating) and, where models select tools and services, through steering and default routing that is difficult to observe and harder to litigate. This essay makes three moves. First, it defines cognitive infrastructure as a falsifiable concept built around measurable reliance, vertical incentives, and discrimination capacity, without assuming a clean market definition. Second, it frames theories of harm using raising-rivals'-costs logic for vertically related and platform markets, where foreclosure can be profitable without anticompetitive pricing. Third, it proposes Neutral Inference: a targeted, auditable conduct approach built around (i) quality-of-service parity, (ii) routing transparency, and (iii) FRAND-style non-discrimination for similarly situated buyers, applied only when observable evidence indicates functional gatekeeper status.
