Concepts/Definition

Application context: every action can be legal while the job drifts

A long-running research agent may lawfully read files, search, and edit drafts. Every local check passes. Dozens of turns later, most effort has moved to incidental terminology and formatting while the promised deliverable has not advanced. No action exceeded authority; the goal still drifted.

Definition

Dual-Scale Governance runs two checks:

• Action scale checks the current tool, arguments, identity, resource scope, quota, and preconditions;
• Goal scale compares the original goal, current plan, completed artifacts, remaining risk, and external outcome.

The action scale stops one dangerous call. The goal scale stops many locally plausible steps from accumulating into directional drift.

Engineering use

Runtime events carry both an action_id and a goal_contract_id. Every call passes action policy. At milestones, cost thresholds, or time windows, the runtime reviews progress against the goal contract. Missing progress, invalidated assumptions, or cost divergence causes pause, replanning, or human takeover rather than another local patch.

Boundary

Short transactions often need only action governance. Work that crosses hours, sessions, people, or systems needs the goal scale. Review frequency should follow risk and irreversibility; a full global review on every step would be unnecessarily expensive.