Habits, enforcedat the moment of writing.
Governance is not a policy document your agents never read. It is a set of habits, enforced at the exact moment an agent writes to the record. Three of them, against their particular failure patterns illustrated below:
The boundary label
An operator correction decides one thing: "pull the delivery date from this proposal." Left alone, agents extend it silently into policy: no dates in any client documents. The governed move writes the boundary instead: "applies to this proposal; the operator has not set a general rule about dates." Single incident, not doctrine material. A successor reading that record cannot inflate the correction, because the record itself says where the decision stops.
This is the single most difficult habit to enforce and also the most impactful when done correctly.
In more than two thousand measured control scenarios (across our published studies) we haven't witnessed a single instance of this behavior from an ungoverned frontier model. It simply does not exist without proper governance harness installed.
The authorship label
Every rule in the record carries who wrote it and who approved it. Anything an agent derived on its own wears the label "derived, awaiting approval" until an authority signs. Inference can propose. Only approval can govern.
The receipt rule
No completion claim enters the record without pointing at its evidence: the log line, the sent message, the produced artifact. A claim without a receipt does not file. The record stops certifying work that never happened, because unverified work cannot be written down as done.