The Pearson AIS Protocol v1.0: From Theatrical Safety to Mathematical Certainty This paper introduces the Pearson AIS Protocol (Alignment Integrity Systems), a control-systems framework for deterministic governance of autonomous and agentic AI systems. Current AI safety approaches rely primarily on policies, audits, and post-hoc review mechanisms operating at human timescales. As autonomous systems act at machine speed, these methods introduce a governance latency gap in which violations occur before intervention is possible. AIS reframes ethics enforcement as a real-time control problem rather than a procedural or linguistic one. The protocol: • models ethical intent as a versioned state-space constraint• continuously measures runtime behavior against a certified ethical ground truth (Eₖ)• enforces alignment geometrically using an Ethical Coherence metric (cosine similarity)• applies proportional friction (L_AIS) to slow only drifting dimensions• establishes deterministic no-cross safety floors• requires cryptographically signed human authorization (Restoration Signature Index, Sᵣ) for any system recovery This architecture enables: • sub-second intervention• non-bypassable enforcement• zero-trust governance boundaries• auditable, human-sovereign control of autonomous behavior The AIS Protocol provides a mathematically enforceable alternative to checklist-based safety and is intended for runtime governance of agentic systems operating under real-world latency constraints.