Governing Agentic AI in the Administrative State: Human Oversight, Cybersecurity Accountability, and Risk in Autonomous Digital Systems

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Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) shifts digital government from systems that generate recommendations toward networked systems that perceive, plan, communicate, invoke tools, initiate actions, and adapt with limited direct supervision. This article examines agentic AI as an intelligent cybersecurity governance problem in public administration because autonomous agents may access sensitive systems, execute delegated authority, propagate errors across Internet-enabled infrastructures, and create accountability gaps at machine speed. It uses a structured integrative review of 40 scholarly and technical sources and 15 formal governance instruments, together with a design-oriented synthesis and comparative framework analysis. The analysis identifies seven risk mechanisms: authorization drift, cross-system cascade, attribution fragmentation, observability loss, velocity-reversibility mismatch, adaptive-change risk, and contestability erosion. In response, the article develops the Hybrid Intelligence Cybersecurity Governance Architecture (HICGA), which links legal mandate and institutional responsibility to delegated action envelopes, consequence-based approval gates, zero-trust identity and access controls, action-chain logging, continuous assurance, interruption, rollback, and rights-preserving review. HICGA reframes nominal human-in-the-loop supervision as retained human authority. The architecture is a conceptual design proposition that still requires expert, simulation, and field validation. Autonomous administrative action is legitimate only when technological agency remains bounded by public authority, auditable across organizational and network boundaries, reversible where feasible, and open to explanation, contestation, and remedy.