The Intent Declaration Primitive (IDP) for Agentic AI Systems

AI agents operating in automated workflows take actions without any normative mechanism for expressing why those actions are being taken. Access tokens declare what an agent is permitted to do; no existing standard declares what the agent believes it is doing, on what reasoning basis, and with what level of confidence, at the moment of action. This document defines the Intent Declaration Primitive (IDP): a structured per-transition declaration submitted by an AI agent to the governing OS kernel at each action step of an execution loop. The IDP is committed to a tamper-evident Event Log before the action executes, enabling post-hoc review of agent reasoning, richer authorization policy evaluation, and enriched denial responses that guide agent behaviour. The IDP also provides the technical basis for compliance with EU AI Act Article 12 logging requirements for high- risk AI systems. This document adds the IDP Commitment Verification mechanism, by which the kernel verifies at each state transition that the agent's actual action matches its declared intent.