Observability Is Not Enforcement: A Doctrinal Framework for Distinguishing Compliance Instrumentation from Runtime Authorization in AI Governance Architectures (Working Paper v1.0)

The rapid proliferation of “AI governance” solutions has created a structural conflation between compliance instrumentation and runtime enforcement. Many contemporary systems embed explainability artifacts, monitoring dashboards, drift detection, and cryptographic signing into development pipelines—improving audit readiness and regulatory traceability. However, these systems frequently do not enforce policy at the point of execution. This paper introduces a formal doctrinal framework that distinguishes: • Evidence-routing compliance systems (observability architectures that document and monitor AI behavior), and• Authorization governance substrates (runtime enforcement architectures that prevent unauthorized…