Cognito: A Formally Verifiable, Metacognitively-Governed Architecture for Trustworthy Agentic AI

Abstract

The rapid shift from generative to agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced a new class of systemic risks, creating a crisis of trust and auditability that current safety paradigms are ill-equipped to handle. This paper introduces Cognito, a novel cognitive architecture for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) designed from first principles for verifiability, safety, and accountability. Cognito operationalizes a dual-process theory of mind through a neuro-symbolic framework, governed by an explicit Metacognitive Controller (CMC) that manages a fast, intuitive sub-symbolic substrate and a slow, deliberative symbolic substrate.1 We address key criticisms of conceptual AGI frameworks by detailing: (1) a formal runtime loop and signal flow that unifies these components; (2) a novel paradigm of Identity-Typed Programming (ITP), which encodes an agent's identity and permissions into its static type signature using Quantitative Type Theory (QTT), enabling compile-time verification of authorization logic 5 ; (3) a hybrid verification model that combines the static guarantees of ITP with a dynamic runtime enforcement layer for contextual safety 7 ; and (4) a Computational Monad Model (CMM) for scaling, which includes a cryptographically verifiable protocol for fusing multiple specialized agents into a coherent, emergent super-agent. By integrating formal methods, metacognitive governance, and a robust identity framework, Cognito provides a technical blueprint for AGI systems that are not only powerful but also provably safe, auditable, and aligned by construction.