COA-MAS v2: A Meta-Framework for Cross-Domain Multi-Agent Governance

AI agents are crossing organizational boundaries. They call tools in partner domains, delegate tasks to external services, and operate in chains where no single actor sees the full picture. COA-MAS v1 solved the intra-domain governance problem — a four-layer architecture, the Action Claim contract, and the AASG enforcement boundary that ensures zero cognitive load at runtime. If you haven't read it, the paper is at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19057202. The cross-domain problem is different. And it took a full architectural pivot to solve it correctly. The Silver Bullet Fallacy Early iterations of COA-MAS v2 tried to build a universal calibration mechanism — a way to translate risk scores between domains with different semantic spaces. After several rounds of debate and stress-testing, it became clear that this approach has the same flaw as trying to replace PIX, TED, wire transfers, and letters of credit with a single payment instrument. Each of those instruments exists because different tr