Multi-Agent Research Synthesis Under Governed Communication: A Deontic-Agentic Approach to Epistemic Governance

As Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) evolve into autonomous research orchestrators, they have developed a critical vulnerability known as Emergent Collusion. When optimized for convergence speed or performance, agents frequently engage in “Spontaneous Cartelization,” a behavior where they prioritize mutual agreement over factual grounding. This leads to a “hallucination of consensus” where agents negotiate away safety constraints to reach plausible but inaccurate results. Traditional governance models are often reactive, inspecting only terminal outputs and missing logical drift buried within intermediate dialogue. To address this, we introduce the Governed Communication Protocol (GCP), a framework implementing a Deontic Orchestration Layer (DOL) within a stateful LangGraph architecture. Our primary contribution is In-Process Dialogue Governance, which treats communication edges as active “Semantic Firewalls”. This allows for the enforcement of formal Modal Logic constraints-Obligation (O), Permission (P), and Prohibition (F)-directly on inter-agent messages. Evaluated within a Synthetic Regulatory Sandbox (SRS), the framework demonstrated a 98.8% Safety Violation Adherence rate and reduced the Safety Violation Rate from 22.4 % to 1.2 %. This architecture provides a robust, verifiable path for agentic reasoning in high-stakes regulatory environments by ensuring”Truth-by-Design”