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arXiv · 2604.25000

Toward a Science of Intent: Closure Gaps and Delegation Envelopes for Open-World AI Agents

Maximiliano Armesto·Christophe Kolb
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Abstract

Recent work has framed intelligence in verifiable tasks as reducing time-to-solution through learned structure and test-time search, while systems work has explored learned runtimes in which computation, memory and I/O migrate into model state. These perspectives do not explain why capable models remain difficult to deploy in open institutions. We propose intent compilation: the transformation of partially specified human purpose into inspectable artifacts that bind execution. The relevant deployment distinction is closed-world solver versus open-world agent. In closed worlds, a checker is largely given; in open worlds, verification is distributed across semantic, evidentiary, procedural and institutional dimensions. Weformalize this residual openness as a closure-gap vector, define delegation envelopes as pre-authorized regions of action space, distinguish misclosure from undersearch, and outline benchmark metrics for testing when closure interventions outperform additional inference-time search.

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Maximiliano Armesto, Christophe Kolb. 2026-04-27. Toward a Science of Intent: Closure Gaps and Delegation Envelopes for Open-World AI Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25000

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