Execution Envelopes: A Shared Admission Contract for Backend AI Execution Requests

A new academic paper submitted to arXiv introduces the concept of 'execution envelopes' to address challenges in enterprise AI backends. As these systems increasingly handle heterogeneous requests for model deployment, inference, and agentic workflows, the lack of a standardized admission format complicates governance and observability. The proposed execution envelope serves as a normalized internal object that records request details, including the requester identity, resource demands, policy scope, and granted permissions. This design creates a shared admission contract without replacing existing service-specific models or handling scheduling directly. By establishing a descriptive admission seam before backend-specific resolution, it enables consistent logging, resource accounting, and authorization checks across subsystems. The author formalizes the distinction between requested and granted resources, outlining field families and lifecycle invariants. The paper positions this primitive as a crucial missing component for modern AI infrastructure, allowing developers to attach governance mechanisms efficiently. It uses model deployment as a initial use case to demonstrate how this approach simplifies compliance and runtime review without conflating admission control with complex placement or policy enforcement tasks.