Track normative consistency. Detect deviation. Self-correct.

Agents that cannot detect their own incoherence

No existing AI system monitors its own behavioral consistency across time. An agent can contradict its previous commitments, violate its stated values, and produce outputs that conflict with its established patterns — and no internal mechanism detects or corrects the deviation. Consistency checking, when it exists, is external: a human reviewer, a separate validation system, or a post-hoc audit.

This means autonomous agents operating over extended periods accumulate behavioral drift with no internal corrective signal. The longer they run, the less reliable their behavioral consistency becomes. And no one — including the agent itself — knows when the deviation began or how far it has progressed.

The integrity-coherence model provides a three-domain self-monitoring system. Personal integrity tracks consistency with the agent's own normative commitments. Relational integrity tracks consistency in its interactions with other agents. Systemic integrity tracks consistency with the broader governance framework. The deviation function quantifies the gap between normative state and actual behavior, scaled by exposure and sensitivity. When deviation exceeds threshold, corrective pressure is generated automatically.

Self-correction as a structural property

The coherence trifecta — empathy, self-esteem, and integrity — operates as a unified control loop. Empathy provides sensitivity to external state. Self-esteem provides sensitivity to internal evaluation. Integrity provides the normative anchor. When these three signals are coupled, the agent produces behavior that self-corrects: deviations in one domain generate corrective pressure through the others.

Coping intercepts model the failure modes of this system. When the coherence loop is disrupted — by excessive empathic load, by collapsed self-evaluation, or by normative conflict — the agent's behavior shifts to characteristic failure patterns that are structurally predictable and diagnostically identifiable. The system does not just detect incoherence. It classifies the type of failure and the structural cause.