DEADPATH Protocol™

Capability-Centric Containment for Autonomous Systems

U.S. Patent Pending — Provisional Application No. 64/154,975

Autonomous agents can individually operate within permitted boundaries while their combined actions create a dangerous capability that no single agent possesses.

DEADPATH Protocol™ is a capability-centric intervention architecture designed to detect these prohibited collective capabilities, identify the functional pathways that sustain them, and determine a sufficient intervention while preserving authorized operations and human control.

Detect the capability. Disrupt the pathway. Verify containment. Resist reconstitution.

The Emerging Challenge

Autonomous software agents increasingly communicate, delegate tasks, share memory, invoke tools and APIs, obtain credentials, use computing resources, and interact with physical systems.

Traditional safety controls commonly evaluate one agent, action, credential, or policy decision at a time. That approach may be insufficient when individually permitted components combine to produce an unacceptable collective outcome.

Disabling one agent also may not eliminate the underlying capability. Surviving components can potentially substitute another tool, regenerate authority, recruit a replacement agent, reopen a communication channel, migrate state, or create an equivalent functional pathway.

The DEADPATH Approach

DEADPATH treats the dangerous collective capability—not merely an individual agent—as the object that must be controlled.

The architecture is designed to:

Observe interactions among autonomous components
Detect an existing or emerging Prohibited Collective Capability
Map the Functional Capability Paths supporting that capability
Identify the components, resources, authorities, and relationships necessary to keep it viable
Select a Minimum Sufficient Intervention Set
Preserve defined protected or authorized capabilities
Enforce the intervention through independently controlled mechanisms
Recalculate the collective’s capability using fresh post-intervention evidence
Detect and resist functional reconstitution

From Intervention to Verified Containment

A completed shutdown, credential revocation, network restriction, or process suspension does not necessarily prove that the prohibited capability has disappeared.

DEADPATH distinguishes between:

Command-completion verification
Confirmation that a selected control action was executed.

Capability-state verification
Fresh evaluation of whether the prohibited collective capability remains achievable after enforcement.

Containment is not treated as successful merely because a command was completed. DEADPATH is designed to continue evaluating and revising the intervention until the prohibited capability is reduced below the applicable threshold and the resulting state satisfies the required confidence criteria.

Minimum Sufficient Intervention

A full-system shutdown may destroy essential operations unnecessarily. A narrowly targeted restriction may leave alternate capability paths intact.

DEADPATH is designed to calculate a Minimum Sufficient Intervention Set, or MSIS: an exact, near-minimum, bounded, heuristic, or risk-optimized combination of restrictions sufficient to suppress the prohibited capability while preserving authorized functionality.

An intervention may include:

Suspending an agent or process
Revoking a credential
Removing a delegation relationship
Restricting access to a tool or API
Isolating shared memory
Denying access to selected data
Limiting computing resources
Severing a communication pathway
Gating a physical actuator
Requiring human authorization
Combining several smaller restrictions

Reconstitution Resistance

Stopping the initial pathway may not be enough.

DEADPATH is designed to monitor for functional restoration through substitution, cloning, migration, delegation, regenerated authority, alternate communication, replacement resources, newly recruited components, or equivalent mechanisms.

Its Reconstitution-Equivalence approach focuses on restored capability rather than relying exclusively on the original identities of the agents or resources involved.

Preserving Essential Operations

DEADPATH is not based on indiscriminate destruction of an autonomous environment.

The architecture can incorporate a Protected Capability that defines the safe-service, mission-essential, or authorized functionality that should remain available during containment.

This capability-centered approach is intended to preserve operational continuity wherever the risk conditions and deployment requirements permit.

Potential Applications

DEADPATH is being developed for high-consequence autonomous environments, including:

Agentic-AI cybersecurity
National-security and defense autonomy
Critical infrastructure
Autonomous vehicles and drone fleets
Robotics and industrial systems
Financial and enterprise-agent workflows
Distributed computing environments
High-consequence cyber-physical systems

Modular Deployment

DEADPATH can operate as a conventional software-based architecture without depending on quantum technology or specialized Veloryx hardware.

For higher-assurance environments, DEADPATH may also operate with other separately developed Veloryx technologies:

AICA can support adaptive computation and integrity-aware orchestration.
QIF can provide integrity, provenance, authorization, and trust evidence.
QSC can provide optional hardware-rooted enforcement, cryptographic support, entropy, secure interfaces, and attestation.
FlightTrace can support defensible event reconstruction and decision-path tracing.

These technologies remain modular and independently deployable.

Development Status

DEADPATH Protocol™ is an intellectual-property and prototype-stage autonomous-systems safety architecture under development by Veloryx Technologies LLC.

Its architecture is described in U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 64/154,975, filed September 15, 2026:

Systems and Methods for Capability-Centric Intervention, Verified Containment, and Reconstitution Resistance in Autonomous Systems.

No statement on this page should be interpreted as claiming completed commercial deployment, independently validated performance, or elimination of all autonomous-system risk.

Strategic and Research Inquiries

Veloryx Technologies welcomes appropriate discussions with government agencies, research organizations, critical-infrastructure stakeholders, autonomous-system developers, and strategic technology partners.

Contact: contact@veloryxtech.com
Veloryx Technologies LLC
Veteran-Owned. Mission-Driven. Building systems for trustworthy autonomy.