The Asimov Safety Architecture for Autonomous AI Agents

This document specifies the Asimov Safety Architecture (ASA), a hierarchical dual-gate security framework for autonomous AI agents that operate with action execution capabilities. The architecture combines a deterministic pattern denylist (Gate 1) with a stateless, context-free LLM judge (Gate 2), governed by a strict four-layer priority hierarchy. The key insight motivating this architecture is that a single LLM will not reliably self-enforce its own safety rules under adversarial pressure. The ASA addresses this by architecturally separating the reasoning model from the judging model, ensuring the judge cannot be manipulated through conversational context. This specification defines the mandatory components, layer semantics, conflict resolution rules, inter-component trust model, and conformance requirements for implementations of the Asimov Safety Architecture.