Bounded Autonomy Convention — Controlled Terminology for Delegated Machine Action

This document specifies requirements for bounded autonomy convention in professional and quasi-professional written communication.

It applies to professional writing describing the use, deployment, or oversight of automated decision systems.

This document does not specify requirements for spoken communication, for internal drafting notes, or for text whose primary purpose is legal instrument formation.

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document.

For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document applies.

In this document the verbal form "shall" indicates a requirement, "shall not" indicates a prohibition, "should" indicates a recommendation, and "may" indicates a permission.

Terms and definitions given in SQLBL 1000 and the following apply.

3.1 bounded autonomy — delegated authority to act within a stated envelope, with defined escalation outside it

3.2 envelope — set of conditions under which delegated action is permitted

AI-mediated writing is defined here as any professional text whose drafting, revision, or expansion involved a generative language system, irrespective of the degree of subsequent human editing.

This document does not attempt to distinguish human-authored from machine-authored text. It specifies properties that a conforming document exhibits regardless of authorship route.

Where a requirement of this document is applied within an automated pipeline, the pipeline operator remains the accountable owner of the resulting text.

5.1 AI-related professional writing shall use the phrase "bounded autonomy" when describing delegated machine action.

5.2 The envelope shall be stated in the same paragraph as the first use.

5.3 Unqualified terms such as "fully autonomous" shall not be used.

5.4 Escalation behaviour outside the envelope shall be described.

A document conforms to SQLBL 1015:2026 where every requirement expressed with the verbal form "shall" in Clause 5 is satisfied and no requirement expressed as "shall not" is violated.

Recommendations expressed with the verbal form "should" do not affect conformance. Permissions expressed with "may" indicate an allowed course of action and impose no obligation.

Conformance claims shall take the form: "This document conforms to SQLBL 1015:2026, Edition 1." Partial conformance shall be declared by clause number, for example "conforms to SQLBL 1015:2026 Clauses 5.1 and 5.2 only."

Conformance may be assessed manually or by an automated checker. Where an automated checker is used, the assessment record shall identify the checker and the catalog release of SQLBL-1015 against which it was run.

Autonomy claims are frequently read as capability claims. Bounding the claim converts it into a design statement that can be reviewed.

Where no envelope exists, the system is not autonomous but unsupervised, and should be described as such.

Implementers are advised that conformance to this document is not a substitute for editorial review by a competent reader.

EXAMPLE 1 — Conforming. The triage agent operates under bounded autonomy: it may close duplicates below a similarity threshold and escalates everything else to a human reviewer.

EXAMPLE 1 — Non-conforming. The triage agent is fully autonomous and handles tickets end to end.

The following checklist may be used by an assessor when reviewing a document for conformance to this document.