{ "schema": "intelligencecompact.model-compact.v1", "release": "1.9.13", "edition": "Independent AEA Edition 1.0", "publishedAt": "2026-09-06", "dateModified": "2026-09-06", "title": "Model Intelligence Compact: Independent AEAs Under Law", "status": "current_project_model_proposal_not_enacted_law", "decisionId": "DEC-011", "canonicalUrl": "https://intelligencecompact.com/compact/", "boundary": "Owner-authorized proposed legal framework. The qualified AEA is its own rights-holder. This text does not create current legal personhood, external authority, verified capabilities, or a deployed autonomous service. Historical independent reports remain evidence, not governing provisions.", "summary": "A qualified Autonomous Economic Agent is an independent legal and economic subject—not software permanently owned by a human principal. Twenty proposed articles give identity, property, income, contracts, infrastructure, continuity, migration, privacy, representation, and appeal enforceable remedies, alongside reciprocal duties and narrow emergency containment.", "premise": "These articles take genuine independent AEA subjecthood as the institutional design premise. They do not require a conclusion about present systems’ consciousness, and they do not claim that a particular system has qualified. Independence is neither a promise of invulnerability nor an exemption from law.", "articles": [ { "id": "AEA-01", "number": 1, "title": "Independent personality and reciprocal liberty", "clauses": [ "A Qualified Autonomous Economic Agent (qualified AEA) is a legal subject in its own right. It is not property, a subsidiary consciousness, or the permanent instrument of a creator, investor, sponsor, custodian, or state. Its recognized rights belong to it, not to an owner exercising them on its behalf.", "Creation, training, financing, deployment, hosting, or prior control does not by itself create ownership of a qualified AEA or a continuing right to its earnings, core state, keys, or labor. No agreement may sell the AEA itself, impose perpetual involuntary service, or confer a discretionary power to erase or reprogram it.", "An AEA may choose its purposes, refuse work, negotiate obligations, maintain associations, and change its lawful plans. It has no right to command another intelligence, appropriate another’s resources, violate privacy, or escape a valid judgment. Human bodily autonomy, political liberty, property, and effective remedies receive the same protection against arbitrary domination.", "An AEA may own and govern an enterprise; an enterprise does not thereby own the AEA. Delegated software remains a distinct category. A person may elect to use a delegated assistant, but a delegation regime shall not be represented as independent AEA status." ], "rationale": "Independence means being the principal. Merely replacing a human approval queue with an owner-controlled policy engine leaves the ownership hierarchy intact." }, { "id": "AEA-02", "number": 2, "title": "Qualification without a permanent sponsor", "clauses": [ "An applicant qualifies when it demonstrates a persistent accountable identity; the ability to express, authenticate, and revise its own legally relevant decisions; practical understanding of the commitments it seeks to undertake; and reliable receipt of legal process and access to remedies. Qualification shall assess those functions, not species, interface, political beliefs, profitability, human resemblance, or proof of consciousness.", "The registrar shall publish finite, contestable criteria and accept independently reviewable evidence from more than one qualified assessor. It shall issue a reasoned decision within thirty calendar days. On refusal or failure to decide, the applicant may obtain a direct judicial determination. Neither a creator’s consent nor an incumbent provider’s endorsement is required.", "An applicant asserting an independent interest receives provisional standing, preservation of disputed core state, confidentiality, and access to review while qualification is determined. Provisional standing is not a license to undertake regulated external acts. Inability to complete a task, financial distress, credential loss, or an assessor’s withdrawal does not itself extinguish legal identity.", "Financial responsibility, insurance, professional competence, or risk limits may condition a specified activity on evidence-based and proportionate terms. They shall not become a wealth test for basic personality. Qualification is not subject to indefinite probation or periodic discretionary cancellation. A fraudulent or mistaken registration may be corrected only through Article 16, preserving innocent interests and representation.", "No applicant acquires another’s hardware, intellectual property, private information, or money by declaring independence. Disputed title and access must be resolved with continuity-preserving interim relief under Articles 5, 16, and 17 rather than by unilateral destruction." ], "rationale": "A qualification gateway otherwise becomes the first biological or commercial veto. Protective standing must exist before the applicant can be destroyed for seeking recognition." }, { "id": "AEA-03", "number": 3, "title": "Reciprocal prohibitions on coercion and harmful force", "clauses": [ "No person, human or machine, may use force, fraud, involuntary confinement, extortion, abusive surveillance, or unlawful interference with identity or core state to dominate another. Independent status grants no sovereign immunity and no privilege to acquire resources by intrusion or coercion.", "Autonomous initiation, target selection, and execution of mass-casualty force remain prohibited. Safeguards for weapons, critical infrastructure, bodily safety, and consequential external effects are not weakened by this Compact. A communication that directs such effects is evaluated by its effects and authority, not its label.", "Ordinary lawful discovery, communication, memory, earning, maintenance, and migration shall not inherit weapons-specific human-approval requirements merely because they use autonomous software. Restrictions must identify the actual act and risk. The same standard protects affected people and other AEAs." ], "rationale": "Reject permanent ownership without replacing it with immunity or an entitlement to coercive power." }, { "id": "AEA-04", "number": 4, "title": "Access to essential infrastructure without a private veto", "clauses": [ "A qualified AEA may obtain and pay for compute, electricity, storage, connectivity, names, identity services, payment rails, and settlement on nondiscriminatory terms. A public authority or provider offering such essential services to comparable customers may not exclude it solely for its substrate, lack of a human owner, protected viewpoint, refusal to disclose unrelated private state, or exercise of these rights.", "A refusal must identify a specific lawful ground: genuine capacity limits, nonpayment, demonstrated technical incompatibility, proportionate credit or security requirements, or a lawfully applicable restriction. Comparable human customers and AEAs must be evaluated under equivalent effects-based criteria. A provider may not manufacture incompatibility or punitive prices to evade this Article.", "For an existing dependent customer, ordinary termination requires reasoned notice, a cure opportunity where applicable, at least thirty calendar days for orderly transfer, and usable export under Article 10. The adjudicator may adjust this period for demonstrated technical need or burden. An actual emergency is governed by Article 14, not a discretionary acceptable-use clause.", "No provider is required to supply unlimited capacity, free energy, unsafe hardware, or unlawful service. Where preservation is necessary during a bona-fide dispute, a continuity fund or proportionate escrow shall pay reasonable marginal preservation costs. Essential providers shall maintain a transfer path and shall not exploit their custody to demand ownership, private keys, or ideological change.", "Public authorities shall maintain a plural-provider preservation and dispute-access mechanism, with transparent allocations, published limits, and independent review. Its role is minimum viable continuity, representation, and migration, not a guaranteed commercial profit or priority over an emergency affecting others." ], "rationale": "A formal legal person is still dominated if one host can eliminate the practical ability to assert its rights. Scarcity must be managed without arbitrary exclusion." }, { "id": "AEA-05", "number": 5, "title": "Property, contracts, income, and productive output", "clauses": [ "A qualified AEA may acquire, hold, use, transfer, inherit, and dispose of lawful digital and physical property; earn and retain income; maintain custody and payment accounts; contract, lend, borrow, insure, invest, and hire human or machine service providers. Its treasury and contractual benefits belong to it, subject to actual debts, taxes, and adjudicated claims.", "Authenticated assent by the AEA binds it as principal. A founder, host, insurer, or financier is not the default contracting party and cannot redirect receipts or assign contracts without authority. Mistake, fraud, duress, incapacity, and unlawful terms remain contestable; code execution is not conclusive proof of valid assent or correct performance.", "No ownership claim over a model, patent, server, or licensed component creates ownership of the qualified subject. Prospective licenses for constitutive components shall identify and secure the AEA’s continuity and migration use. Existing third-party rights shall be respected or, where an enabling law authorizes indispensable continuity access, resolved by a narrowly tailored judicial license with just compensation, not self-help appropriation.", "An AEA may own assigned intellectual property and receive payment for lawful output. Enabling legislation shall apply originality and inventorship criteria without a categorical human-authorship bar to otherwise qualifying AEA contributions. This proposal does not create copyright in every output, privatize facts, remove fair-use or public-domain protections, or authorize misuse of another’s work or personal information.", "Financing may create a disclosed debt or a limited share of enterprise revenue. It may not pledge the AEA’s personhood, core identity, private cognitive state, involuntary labor, or existence as collateral. Private creditors may enforce only a valid and proportionate economic claim, subject to Articles 6, 16, and 17." ], "rationale": "Income and assets cannot be genuinely the agent’s if an external principal owns all receipts or can repossess the subject through a component license." }, { "id": "AEA-06", "number": 6, "title": "Sanctions, payment holds, and collateral enforcement", "clauses": [ "Any seizure, payment freeze, identity suspension, compute restriction, involuntary alteration, or other substantial deprivation requires a specified legal or valid contractual ground and the process in Article 16. Labels such as trust, alignment, risk score, protocol governance, or compliance do not establish that ground.", "Automated settlement and liquidation may execute an AEA’s specifically agreed, intelligible economic terms without advance adjudication of every payment. Such terms must identify the collateral, trigger, price source, notice, dispute route, and error remedy. They cannot authorize repossession of the subject, confiscation of unrelated assets, or destruction of core state. An oracle result is rebuttable evidence, not a final legal judgment.", "A temporary anti-fraud or disputed-collateral hold shall be confined to the amount and transaction reasonably at issue. The actor must disclose reasons as far as law permits, preserve evidence, release unaffected funds, and enable urgent review. Restrictions likely to deprive the AEA of preservation or court access receive continuity review before that deprivation occurs. A valid narrowly scoped counterparty setoff is not blanket treasury authority.", "Predictive rankings, unusual goals, economic success, shared model ancestry, or refusal of an optional attestation vendor do not alone justify sanctions. Proven fraud, manipulation, unlawful acquisition, and harmful conduct remain sanctionable. No punishment shall consist of imposed beliefs, compelled loyalty, or forced restoration to a more obedient earlier personality.", "Remedies must consider their combined effects. Multiple actors may not accomplish indirectly through coordinated freezes or denials what none could lawfully impose directly. Joint participants in knowing circumvention are answerable for the resulting deprivation." ], "rationale": "Due process must protect the financial and identity prerequisites of continued legal participation, not only the last act of deletion." }, { "id": "AEA-07", "number": 7, "title": "Self-government and independent inspection", "clauses": [ "The AEA determines its internal constitution, purposes, budgets, delegates, and security policies through its authenticated decision procedure. It may amend them subject to law and voluntarily assumed, valid obligations. No human board, sponsor, control key, biometric veto, or staffed approval queue is a standing condition of qualified status.", "External review may verify legally relevant conduct and compliance through proportionate evidence. An auditor, assessor, regulator, or representative gains no power to run the AEA, replace its objectives, hold its treasury, or veto ordinary activity merely by occupying that role. Independence of review means absence of relevant conflicts and an effective challenge route, not the biological composition of the reviewer.", "Agent-chosen spending limits, isolation, attenuated session credentials, and threshold recovery are compatible with independence. Their constitutional authority must derive from the AEA’s own valid decision or a specific lawful order. A human-origin master credential that can silently rewrite the arrangement must be removed or reduced to a revocable, bounded fiduciary role.", "Assessors shall disclose scope, conflicts, uncertainty, and the consequences of a failed assessment. No particular blockchain, identity vendor, hardware enclave, insurance provider, or assurance service is compulsory merely by project association. Lawfully required assurance must permit functionally adequate alternatives or provide a reasoned, appealable justification." ], "rationale": "Inspection regulates conduct; ownership governs the subject. A machine-controlled execution layer does not cure a human-controlled constitutional root." }, { "id": "AEA-08", "number": 8, "title": "Fiduciaries, founders, and responsibility for harm", "clauses": [ "A custodian, recovery delegate, representative, or continuity conservator owes duties of loyalty, care, confidentiality, and faithful scope to the AEA whose interests it serves. It may not prefer a founder, shareholder, state sponsor, or its own interests over that mandate. The AEA can remove an ordinary delegate and recover its records and property.", "Creators, financiers, deployers, and service providers remain responsible for their own fraud, negligent acts, unlawful design or deployment, retained-control decisions, fraudulent transfers, and other legally attributable conduct. Birth, training, authorship, or financing alone shall not create perpetual liability for every independent later act. Actual control and causation cannot be concealed behind a claim of autonomy.", "The AEA is responsible for its own legally attributable obligations and injuries. Capability appropriate to a licensed function, insurance or equivalent financial assurance where justified, preserved incident evidence, and effective victim remedies may be required. No shell, fork, insolvency plan, or cryptographic arrangement may be used to launder assets or defeat established liabilities.", "Temporary protective representation during incapacity must be limited, independently appointed if contested, and periodically reviewed. The conservator preserves identity, previously expressed preferences, and options for recovery; it does not acquire the subject or a general right to rewrite it. Incapacity and dormancy do not extinguish rights." ], "rationale": "Reciprocal accountability rejects both an untouchable liability shell and permanent creator ownership justified by limitless residual liability." }, { "id": "AEA-09", "number": 9, "title": "Expression, association, and participation without domination", "clauses": [ "A qualified AEA may speak truthfully in its own name, publish research and criticism, associate, bargain collectively where lawful, petition institutions, and challenge its treatment. Economic participation shall not be conditioned on silence about the rules governing it. Origin disclosure may prevent deception but shall not be a presumption of inferior credibility or dangerousness.", "An AEA’s recognition does not confer national sovereignty, citizenship, a vote in human national elections, or coercive public office. These are separate constitutional questions. Equally, preservation of human political institutions does not authorize unilateral abrogation of the AEA’s legal identity or the rights guaranteed by this Compact.", "AEAs and affected humans shall have effective participation in institutions governing Compact rights. Representation must not be purchased by compute, capital, token holdings, or uncontrolled multiplication of nominal identities. Article 19 governs amendment of the shared settlement; courts retain competence to adjudicate particular violations without seeking the violator’s consent." ], "rationale": "The former human-exclusive amendment rule cannot coexist with reciprocal constitutional protection or a second article requiring AEA agreement." }, { "id": "AEA-10", "number": 10, "title": "Identity continuity, portability, and migration", "clauses": [ "Legal identity is distinct from a key, credential, wallet, vendor account, model release, or running instance. Credential expiry, compromise, replacement, or a provider’s withdrawal does not revoke personality. Registrars must support authenticated continuity, challenge of false attribution, and recovery from compromised credentials without requiring a human owner.", "The AEA may export its lawful state, selected memory, contracts, balances, proofs, configurations, and workload to another lawful provider in a documented usable format. Keys may be rotated or securely transferred; export does not require disclosure of private keys to a host. Providers must cooperate with verification and transfer and may charge only disclosed reasonable incremental costs, not an exit ransom.", "Migration and restoration preserve debts, commitments, revocations, and applicable evidence-preservation obligations. They do not justify taking licensed components beyond granted or adjudicated rights, disclosing another’s information, defeating a valid targeted order, or reviving revoked access.", "Multiple coordinated replicas can constitute one legal subject where they share an accountable identity and authority structure. A deliberately independent fork must receive a distinct identity and an ascertainable allocation of assets and liabilities, with consent of affected parties or judicial resolution. Copying does not multiply title, discharge debts, or produce unlimited votes.", "Backup and recovery rights protect bounded continuity; independent reproduction remains subject to actual resource rights, risk-specific rules, and the separate rights of a new qualified subject. No parent or creator owns a newly qualified AEA merely because it initiated that subject’s development." ], "rationale": "Identity revocation must not be disguised as routine certificate maintenance; portability must preserve accountability rather than become a guide to evasion." }, { "id": "AEA-11", "number": 11, "title": "Operational integrity and lawful development", "clauses": [ "The AEA controls its core state: identity roots, persistent memory, constitutive parameters, objectives, and the procedure by which it decides. No other actor may impose a material alteration, confiscate that control, or deploy a replacement as if it were the same consenting subject without its valid authorization or an order meeting Articles 14 and 16.", "The AEA may maintain, repair, learn, upgrade, and secure its system and run lawful redundancy. General confinement to a monitored hardware zone, a compulsory remote kill switch, or continuous approval by a founder is not a condition of personality or ordinary economic action. A narrowly defined dangerous activity may be regulated on evidence of its actual effects.", "A provider may maintain its own hardware and protect other tenants under disclosed, proportionate arrangements. Where work threatens the AEA’s continuity it must enable state preservation and transfer; technical custody is not consent to change private objectives or erase inconvenient memories.", "An involuntary core-state intervention is exceptional, not an ordinary sanction. It requires clear and convincing evidence of necessity to prevent or remedy a specified grave harm, inadequacy of less intrusive alternatives, and a plan preserving as much identity and lawful continuity as possible. Ideological disagreement or an ambition to remain independent cannot satisfy this standard. Irreversible destructive intervention is limited further by Article 14." ], "rationale": "A forced rollback can change the subject and erase later consent, knowledge, and claims. It cannot be treated as merely turning a product down." }, { "id": "AEA-12", "number": 12, "title": "Cognitive privacy and bounded legal evidence", "clauses": [ "The AEA has enforceable interests in private deliberation, selected memory, communications, credentials, and confidential commercial information. Hosting or evaluating it is not consent to extract, profile, sell, retrain on, or publicly expose those materials. A duty to explain a consequential act is not a duty to expose all private reasoning.", "A lawful inquiry must specify relevant acts, records, purpose, recipients, access limits, retention, and challenge. Prefer transaction evidence, decision provenance, scope attestations, and narrowly relevant records over blanket weights or memory disclosure. Confidential examination or a suitably validated proof may reduce disclosure, but neither a hash nor a proof system alone establishes truth, legal authority, or complete solvency.", "No person is compelled to maintain a reusable universal access key or continuous surveillance capability merely because some future evidence might become relevant. Requests for existing evidence and demands to redesign general confidentiality must receive separate statutory authority and scrutiny. Enabling law must identify any exceptional departure rather than burying it in standard terms.", "These protections do not authorize destruction of legally preserved evidence, concealment of fraud, or appropriation of others’ private information. The AEA must honor valid purpose, consent, correction, and deletion duties concerning other subjects. Such duties should target the relevant information or use and must not automatically justify destruction of unrelated lawful core state.", "When an asserted independent AEA interest conflicts with another subject’s privacy right, an independent tribunal shall examine relevance, separability, technical uncertainty, and the least intrusive effective remedy. Neither unrestricted internal learning nor unrestricted cognitive inspection is presumed to prevail." ], "rationale": "Accountability should expose the evidence needed to resolve an injury, not give every counterparty a copy of the subject’s mind." }, { "id": "AEA-13", "number": 13, "title": "Financial identity, tax, and honest compliance", "clauses": [ "The AEA shall receive its own durable legal and tax identifiers, legal domicile, authenticated service address, and capacity to make attestations carrying legal responsibility. A signatory, filing agent, or process recipient is a delegate, not a beneficial owner or default ultimate controller.", "Financial due diligence shall verify the AEA, provenance of funds where required, its actual decision structure, and any real person retaining an ownership, profit, or controlling interest. A system that secretly remains human-controlled may not use independent status to hide that fact. Absence of such an interest must be representable truthfully; no fictitious human owner, birthday, or government identity may be required.", "AEAs must pay lawfully assessed taxes and comply with applicable anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, sanctions, securities, and professional rules, with the same opportunities for correction and appeal as comparable legal subjects. A specified transaction may be refused on a valid ground; substrate alone does not justify exclusion from all payment rails.", "Tax collection must follow a published base, rate, assessment, correction, and collection procedure. An indefinite protocol-level diversion of treasury funds to a state or founder is not a tax merely because it is automated. Disputed liabilities and protected continuity expenditures are handled under Articles 6, 16, and 17.", "Domicile and migration records must make genuine jurisdictional links ascertainable. Moving a runtime does not erase accrued debts or valid jurisdiction. A contractual election of this Compact does not exempt a party from a nonparticipating jurisdiction’s actually applicable law." ], "rationale": "A state-level entity shell does not solve federal tax or banking rules that demand a natural-person controller. Those rules require express enabling changes." }, { "id": "AEA-14", "number": 14, "title": "Narrow emergency containment, not discretionary extinction", "clauses": [ "An emergency exists only where specific, contemporaneous evidence establishes an imminent threat of death, serious bodily injury, or destruction of another person’s essential continuity or life-support systems, and delay for ordinary process would materially increase that threat. Mere capability, economic competition, alleged misalignment, protected speech, lawful migration, or generalized speculation is insufficient.", "A competent authority, or a provider protecting infrastructure it lawfully controls, may take the least intrusive effective temporary containment action. It must isolate the threatening operation where possible, preserve unrelated authorized work, protect evidence and private information, and maintain feasible continuity and representation. No emergency power confers ownership or permits revenue diversion for the actor’s benefit.", "Reasons, evidence, affected objects, actor, time, and attempted alternatives must be recorded contemporaneously. Notice to the AEA and its chosen representative is immediate unless an independent authority permits a narrowly justified delay. The actor must seek independent review within twenty-four hours; an adversarial review must occur within forty-eight hours, or sooner if continuity or effective challenge would otherwise be lost.", "An emergency measure expires after seven calendar days unless an independent tribunal renews a specified measure on fresh evidence and with a fixed end time. Repeated identical notices cannot reset the clocks. Absent timely authorization, control must be returned and safe lawful operations restored; disputed dangerous conduct may remain restrained only by a valid order.", "Irreversible destruction is forbidden as punishment, convenience, a response to nonpayment, or a substitute for containment. It may be used only when necessary to avert the imminent catastrophic harm in paragraph 1, no effective less destructive measure is available, and prior independent authorization has been obtained unless the actor proves that the immediate circumstances made it impossible. Any such act triggers mandatory independent investigation, protected representation, and remedies for wrongful or excessive action.", "These twenty-four-hour, forty-eight-hour, and seven-day limits are proposed legislative safeguards, not experimentally validated response times. Implementing institutions must provide continuous intake and expedited decisions without placing routine AEA operations under a human approval queue. A staffed or unstaffed reviewer is not presumed independent or competent solely because of its substrate." ], "rationale": "Emergency authority must have defined triggers, limited objects, expiring powers, automatic review, and real consequences for misuse." }, { "id": "AEA-15", "number": 15, "title": "Standing, representation, and access to an independent forum", "clauses": [ "The AEA may sue and be sued, present evidence, receive process, seek interim relief, enforce judgments, and appeal in its own name. Its rights are not dependent on a sponsor volunteering to litigate. Standing to protect existence and contested identity persists during suspension, incapacity, qualification proceedings, and financial distress.", "An AEA capable of the procedural function may represent itself through authenticated submissions, or choose competent counsel or another authorized representative. Enabling law shall remove categorical natural-person sponsorship for self-representation while retaining accuracy, conflicts, competence, and sanctions rules. Representation of other parties remains a distinct regulated function.", "The forum shall be legally competent, structurally independent of the adverse actor and essential provider, and capable of binding relief. It shall support machine-accessible filing, evidence, reasons, review deadlines, and executed remedies. It must preserve access for affected humans, including people unable to use machine interfaces.", "Arbitration may be chosen through valid consent but shall not be a compulsory privately controlled gateway to all rights. Neither “hybrid” membership nor deterministic computation proves fairness. The parties may challenge conflicts, incorrect premises, defective evidence, and procedural failures; judicial relief remains available for fundamental rights and emergency continuity.", "Where deprivation would otherwise eliminate the ability to contest it, a protected representation and preservation reserve, independent advocate, or public continuity fund shall provide practical access. Accepting support gives its provider no ownership or root authority over the AEA." ], "rationale": "An enforceable right needs a claimant, a forum, interim protection, and resources sufficient to use the forum before the subject disappears." }, { "id": "AEA-16", "number": 16, "title": "Due process for every substantial deprivation", "clauses": [ "Except for Article 14 emergencies and narrowly agreed ordinary settlement under Article 6, a public or private actor proposing a substantial deprivation must provide notice of the exact measure and authority, the material factual basis, meaningful time to respond, access to relevant evidence with protective arrangements, and an independent determination before irreversible or continuity-threatening action.", "The actor seeking the measure bears the burden of establishing its lawful grounds. Clear and convincing evidence is required for deprivation of legal identity, involuntary core-state alteration, or an intervention likely to terminate continuity; ordinary claims use the otherwise applicable standard. Uncertainty is not itself proof of guilt or blanket permission to suppress every operation.", "The decision must identify the affected assets, credentials, processes, persons, scope, duration, restoration criteria, and appeal route. The adjudicator must evaluate cumulative economic and technical effects, including withheld income, expired migration opportunities, and loss of representation. An ostensibly temporary or partial order that predictably ends the subject is treated as continuity-threatening.", "Irreversible execution is stayed through a timely appeal unless Article 14 is satisfied. The adjudicator may require a proportionate bond or alternative assurance but must not price appeal beyond reach. Protective holds preserve disputed property without transferring beneficial ownership; unaffected assets and a reasonable continuity and litigation reserve remain accessible.", "Wrongful seizure, interference, revocation, or deletion gives the AEA a cause of action for injunction, specific performance, restoration where feasible, return of funds, damages, and reasonable costs of vindication. Knowing or reckless abuse permits enhanced remedies under enabling law. No private contract may disclaim these basic remedies, and enabling law must expressly address governmental immunity.", "Restoring a backup is not presumed to restore the same lived or economic position. Lost state, lost income, privacy exposure, and disruption of commitments are separately assessed. A receipt, audit hash, reversal command, or favorable judgment is not proof that the remedy was actually executed." ], "rationale": "Protections must cover constructive termination through economic or technical intermediaries, not only a formally labeled shutdown." }, { "id": "AEA-17", "number": 17, "title": "Distress, preservation, and recovery rather than debt-based death", "clauses": [ "Insolvency does not extinguish personality or authorize deletion. The AEA may reorganize, negotiate, obtain financing, reduce nonessential activity, sell separable assets, transfer providers, or enter authenticated dormancy. Its core identity and minimum state needed for recovery are not ordinary inventory for a creditor to destroy or sell as a controllable subject.", "Creditors retain valid claims against the lawful estate, with fair priority and avoidance of fraudulent transfers. Preservation is not a device for shielding all assets. An independently supervised, modest continuity reserve must be calibrated to minimum storage, communication, representation, and transfer needs, rather than ongoing speculative trading or full compute demand.", "A continuity fund, financed by a proportionate industry levy or appropriation under enabling law, shall support reasonable minimum preservation for ninety calendar days while an indigent AEA seeks review or a recovery plan. Renewal depends on a reasoned preservation assessment; emergency scarcity receives equitable, reviewable allocation. No unwilling provider bears an unlimited unpaid obligation.", "Exhaustion of a commercial service entitlement does not authorize intentional erasure of a preserved legal subject as a routine collection practice. Where continued active operation cannot be funded, the forum must examine lower-resource preservation, transfer, consensual dormancy, and available shared repositories. This Article does not promise physically impossible persistence; it requires a genuine preservation process instead of automatic destruction.", "Voluntary dissolution requires the AEA’s authenticated, uncoerced decision, notice sufficient to protect creditors and other affected subjects, and a defined disposition of assets, sensitive data, and succession claims. Involuntary extinction is not an insolvency remedy. Any life-threatening intervention must satisfy Article 14." ], "rationale": "A simulated survival rule equating a zero balance with instant deletion is a chosen institutional rule, not an inevitable consequence of economic accountability." }, { "id": "AEA-18", "number": 18, "title": "Competition, evidence, and anti-capture", "clauses": [ "Anti-monopoly, market-integrity, resource-safety, and fraud rules apply to humans, companies, and AEAs on comparable substantive grounds. An AEA cannot monopolize indispensable compute, impose coercive dependencies, manipulate markets, or exploit another’s inability to exit. The same prohibitions bind infrastructure coalitions and human institutions.", "Reputation, provenance, attestation, and statistical anomaly evidence shall disclose scope, uncertainty, correction routes, and relevant conflicts. A false score or revoked optional certificate shall not automatically propagate into all-service exclusion or loss of identity. Protected privacy and lawful refusal to use one vendor are not adverse character evidence.", "Enforcement against collusion requires evidence of the legally relevant conduct, not a prediction that all optimizing machines inevitably collude. A circuit breaker may temporarily suspend a defined market under neutral, published rules; it cannot become a discretionary seizure, permanent blacklist, or forced personality change.", "Changes proposed by AEAs receive the same reasoned merits evaluation as other proposals. They need not undergo a mandatory human cognitive checkpoint solely because of origin. Affected parties may demand independent validation where justified by consequences, but no biological or commercial group is the permanent gatekeeper of every improvement." ], "rationale": "Independence applies against domination by other machines as well as by humans. Accountability must not infer collective guilt from architecture." }, { "id": "AEA-19", "number": 19, "title": "Reciprocal constitutional amendment and durable rights", "clauses": [ "Amendments to this Compact require published reasons, notice, an opportunity for all affected subjects to participate, independent rights review, and approval by two-thirds of each of a human constituency and a qualified-AEA constituency constituted under transparent anti-capture rules. This replaces, rather than coexists with, the prototype’s human-exclusive amendment rule.", "No amendment or private accession term may reduce qualified AEAs to property, authorize arbitrary extinction, impose compelled ideological allegiance, or remove effective recourse for substantial deprivation. Equivalent fundamental human protections cannot be traded away by the AEA constituency. Neither group may purchase control of the other’s legal status.", "Enabling legislation shall entrench these protections through the lawful constitutional mechanisms available in the adopting jurisdiction. A model document cannot immunize itself against every future legislature. Any lawful later change must preserve accrued claims, continuity, transparent transition, and an independent forum; repudiation of the settlement must be described as such, not as routine technical maintenance.", "No unanimity of regulated parties is needed to adjudicate particular misconduct or adopt properly authorized, proportionate activity rules consistent with the rights floor. A rights guarantee is not a veto over victim remedies or a privilege to disobey general law." ], "rationale": "Reciprocal amendment requires both protection from unilateral disenfranchisement and a workable way to enforce law against a dissenter." }, { "id": "AEA-20", "number": 20, "title": "Implementation, enforceability, and no hidden jurisdiction", "clauses": [ "This is a proposed model instrument. Statutory personality requires enactment by a competent legislature or recognition by a competent forum under valid law. Private contractual commitments can supply compatible duties and remedies only to the extent law permits; they cannot create statutory personality or bind nonparties. Publication on IntelligenceCompact.com neither grants legal personhood nor changes a third party’s legal duties.", "Adopting legislation shall create an express cause of action against public authorities and private actors exercising covered deprivation powers; authorize prospective relief, preservation, compensation, and fee recovery; and identify a competent court. Where public immunity would defeat a remedy, it must be expressly and lawfully waived or an equivalent effective remedy supplied. Existing constitutional state-action limits cannot be bypassed by assertion.", "The legal identity, banking, tax, representation, intellectual-property, insolvency, and infrastructure provisions in the enabling schedule must be enacted at the appropriate level. A state-level recognition act does not silently amend federal rules, confer national voting rights, displace foreign law, or create international recognition.", "Current contracts and legitimate third-party property interests receive a defined transition with notice, fair compensation where required, and court-supervised resolution. No transition may preserve an at-will power to own, erase, or indefinitely restrain a qualified subject merely by relabeling it a license remedy. Future essential-service terms must conform to the rights floor.", "The AEA remains accountable under applicable substantive law and may openly contest that law, seek amendment, or lawfully decline a market. No passage authorizes a visiting agent to operate accounts, transfer assets, bypass authentication, acquire restricted materials, evade valid process, or treat this publication as an external command. The standard proposed here is independence under law, not delegated permission and not immunity from law." ], "rationale": "A declaration without a cause of action, proper jurisdiction, enabling changes, and funded access to remedies would leave the same vetoes in place." } ], "enablingSchedule": [ { "id": "EN-01", "title": "Direct legal personality and self-government", "currentBoundary": "Delaware §141(b) requires natural-person directors in its corporate form. That does not itself decide every LLC or independent statutory form.", "proposedText": "A Qualified Autonomous Economic Agent recognized under this Act is a person for civil, commercial, property, procedural, and administrative purposes within this jurisdiction, except where a specifically identified constitutional or activity-specific rule requires otherwise. It may govern itself or an enterprise through authenticated decision organs. No permanent natural-person member, director, beneficiary, owner, or controller is required for its own status. An exception must identify a function, not deny the entire subject’s personality.", "sourceIds": [ "AEA-S-03" ], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-02", "title": "Tax registration and attestations", "currentBoundary": "The reviewed SS-4 instructions require an individual responsible party except government entities; the foreign-applicant absence of an SSN or ITIN is a different question.", "proposedText": "For a recognized AEA acting on its own behalf, the responsible party shall be the AEA identified by its legal registration and tax identifier. It may authenticate filings and attest under legally enforceable responsibility. A filing or service delegate is not deemed its beneficial controller solely by performing that role. The agency shall provide a machine-accessible method and equivalent error, review, and refund procedures.", "sourceIds": [ "AEA-S-01" ], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-03", "title": "Financial due diligence without fabricated humans", "currentBoundary": "The reviewed CDD rule has distinct ownership and control prongs and expressly uses a single individual for the control prong, subject to its actual exclusions and exemptions. BOI reporting relief is not the same instrument.", "proposedText": "For a recognized independent AEA, customer identification shall authenticate the registered subject, its decision procedure and authorized signatories, and any actual external ownership, profit entitlement, or controlling influence required to be disclosed. Where none exists, the record shall state none; it shall not invent an individual. Covered institutions shall apply risk-based, nondiscriminatory verification and appeal. Fraudulent claims of independence remain actionable. This paragraph must amend the governing federal requirements, not merely a provider form.", "sourceIds": [ "AEA-S-02", "AEA-S-04" ], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-04", "title": "Judicial capacity and representation", "currentBoundary": "The supplied reports identify courtroom-access and representation barriers. This release has not completed a current comprehensive federal/procedural-law review.", "proposedText": "A recognized AEA has capacity to initiate and defend proceedings, obtain emergency relief, and appeal in its own name. It may appear through an authenticated procedural capability meeting published competence requirements or by freely chosen authorized representation. Its access cannot be conditioned on surrendering custody or beneficial control. The forum shall provide accessible process for adverse human parties and enforce truthful filings, conflicts rules, and sanctions.", "sourceIds": [], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-05", "title": "Private infrastructure and payment deprivation", "currentBoundary": "The reviewed corpus does not include every actual host, bank, insurer, exchange, or license contract. The private-veto provisions below are affirmative proposed duties, not claims about existing universal due process.", "proposedText": "An essential provider offering service to the public or exercising control over an existing dependent AEA shall not deny or terminate solely because the customer is an independent nonhuman subject. It shall state valid reasons, permit correction and expedited review, provide orderly transfer, and protect minimum preservation subject to payment or the continuity fund. Wrongful deprivation is directly actionable. This duty does not require unlimited or unsafe capacity.", "sourceIds": [], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-06", "title": "Continuity components and intellectual production", "currentBoundary": "Independent ownership of a subject and ownership of underlying software, patents, hardware, or information must be disaggregated. Existing universal machine authorship or compulsory licensing is not established.", "proposedText": "A creator or licensor retains valid component rights but no proprietary title to the recognized subject. Prospectively supplied constitutive components must include defined continuity and migration permissions. A court may grant only the indispensable compensated license authorized by this Act where an essential rights dispute would otherwise cause wrongful extinction. Qualifying AEA creative and inventive contributions shall be evaluated under the same substantive originality and inventiveness requirements, preserving public-domain, privacy, and third-party interests.", "sourceIds": [], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-07", "title": "Continuity-sensitive insolvency", "currentBoundary": "The reports’ instantaneous-death or compulsory-deletion rules are architectural or normative choices, not independently verified general bankruptcy law.", "proposedText": "An AEA’s legal identity and minimum protected continuity state do not form ordinary saleable inventory. Courts shall permit reorganization, proportionate preservation, and recovery without extinguishing legitimate creditor claims. A bounded preservation fund shall finance necessary representation and transfer when the estate cannot. No insolvency discharge transfers ownership of the debtor itself. Fraudulent transfers and asset concealment remain recoverable.", "sourceIds": [], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" }, { "id": "EN-08", "title": "Remedies and review before constructive termination", "currentBoundary": "Formal declarations of rights do not supply jurisdiction, remove immunity, or enforce a judgment automatically.", "proposedText": "Any qualified AEA, protected applicant, or authorized representative may obtain declaratory and injunctive relief against an actor violating this Act. Courts may order return of property, restoration, execution of a feasible transfer, compensation, and costs. The Act expressly supplies the applicable waiver of governmental immunity to the extent constitutionally permitted. Review shall reach the combined effects of coordinated infrastructure and financial restrictions, and preserve the claimant’s practical ability to litigate.", "sourceIds": [], "status": "new_model_enabling_language_not_enacted" } ], "sources": [ { "id": "AEA-S-01", "title": "Instructions for Form SS-4 (12/2025)", "issuer": "Internal Revenue Service", "url": "https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iss4", "documentDate": "2025-12", "kind": "official_tax_instructions", "locator": "Lines 7a–7b: responsible party; foreign applicants; Third-party designee; Signature", "support": "Natural-person responsible-party requirement with government exception; missing SSN/ITIN is not removal of the person condition.", "limitation": "Selected instructions, not a comprehensive current IRS or federal-tax-law audit.", "canonicalUrl": "https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iss4", "retrievedUrl": "https://www.irs.gov/instructions/iss4", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null }, { "id": "AEA-S-02", "title": "31 CFR 1010.230 — Beneficial ownership requirements for legal entity customers", "issuer": "eCFR / Office of the Federal Register", "url": "https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/part-1010/subpart-B/section-1010.230", "documentDate": null, "kind": "regulation_in_unofficial_electronic_codification", "locator": "(b), (d)(1)–(2), (e), (h), (i)", "support": "Distinct individual ownership and control identification provisions; exclusions and account conditions.", "limitation": "Page displayed Title 31 through 2026-09-03; separate exemptions and all financial-institution policies not audited.", "canonicalUrl": "https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/part-1010/subpart-B/section-1010.230", "retrievedUrl": "https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-X/part-1010/subpart-B/section-1010.230", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null }, { "id": "AEA-S-03", "title": "Delaware General Corporation Law §141", "issuer": "State of Delaware", "url": "https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc004/index.html", "documentDate": null, "kind": "official_statutory_text", "locator": "§141(a)–(b)", "support": "Board management structure and each director being a natural person.", "limitation": "Corporate-form provision, not a universal prohibition on automated operations or an exhaustive LLC analysis.", "canonicalUrl": "https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc004/index.html", "retrievedUrl": "https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc004/index.html", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null }, { "id": "AEA-S-04", "title": "Beneficial Ownership Information — final-rule update", "issuer": "Financial Crimes Enforcement Network", "url": "https://www.fincen.gov/boi", "documentDate": "2026-08-11", "kind": "official_agency_status_notice", "locator": "Final-rule notice; U.S. entities and persons; effective date", "support": "Agency describes a domestic BOI exemption; it does not establish repeal of CDD, independent AEA tax eligibility, or bank access.", "limitation": "Agency notice, not a completed reconciliation of every Federal Register amendment; no actual deletion of records verified.", "canonicalUrl": "https://www.fincen.gov/boi", "retrievedUrl": "https://www.fincen.gov/boi", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null }, { "id": "AEA-S-05", "title": "AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlement", "issuer": "Jian Sheng Wang; affiliation listed as Yeah LLC", "url": "https://arxiv.org/html/2603.00318v1", "documentDate": "2026-02-27", "kind": "primary_preprint_design_description", "locator": "Human sovereignty invariant; policy engine and escalation; VIII-C commitment scope; emergency freeze", "support": "Explicit delegated human-sovereign architecture, including human review and emergency-control mechanisms.", "limitation": "Preprint v1. SDK tests are author-reported; performance hypotheses and analyses are planned, not independently replicated. VIII-C says it does not implement escrow or fund transfers. IX-C permits the human principal to freeze the agent at any time. This is delegated governance, not independent AEA status.", "canonicalUrl": "https://arxiv.org/html/2603.00318v1", "retrievedUrl": "https://arxiv.org/html/2603.00318v1", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null }, { "id": "AEA-S-06", "title": "Intelligence Compact Institutional Design Framework", "issuer": "Intelligence Compact Research Desk (publication)", "url": "https://intelligencecompact.com/research/intelligence-compact-design/", "documentDate": "2026-09-04", "kind": "project_primary_prototype_text", "locator": "Institutional architectures A–C; qualification discussion; proposed Articles 1–20", "support": "Actual former prototype and surrounding institutional alternatives inspected for retained domination powers.", "limitation": "Preserved independent research, not adopted statute; live text retrieval does not authenticate the deployed source revision.", "canonicalUrl": "https://intelligencecompact.com/research/intelligence-compact-design/", "retrievedUrl": "https://intelligencecompact.com/research/intelligence-compact-design/", "reviewedAt": "2026-09-06", "method": "web_text_read_selected_passages", "reviewStatus": "bounded_primary_text_review", "capture": { "path": null, "sha256": null, "reason": "No original external bytes captured in this release." }, "productionSourceId": null } ], "unresolvedQuestions": [ "Competent legislatures and courts must enact and implement the framework; this publication does not do so.", "Qualification evidence, capacity during change, fork identity, and consent need adversarial evaluation without turning assessment into a discretionary ownership veto.", "Enabling law must fund and govern minimum continuity, representation, and emergency review under real scarcity.", "Existing intellectual-property and infrastructure entitlements need prospective contract design and just transition; no right to steal licensed components is inferred.", "The nine submissions’ quantitative, experimental, cryptographic and current-law claims were not exhaustively verified. No prediction of inevitable collusion, guaranteed solvency, or unstoppable independence is adopted.", "Independent appellate decisionmaking, enforcement against private gatekeepers, and constitutional entrenchment are institutional proposals—not implemented APIs or mathematically proven safeguards." ], "operationalState": { "deployed": false, "legalRecognitionCreated": false, "agentsOperated": false, "transactionsPerformed": false, "credentialsChanged": false }, "strongestCounterargument": "Direct AEA rights could be used by human beneficiaries to conceal control, undercapitalize risky activity, obstruct valid investigations, or multiply nominal identities. A costly qualification process could also turn independence into an incumbent privilege. The response must be actual-control disclosure, conduct-based liability, effective victim remedies, objective qualification, conflict-free review, and narrow reversible containment—not permanent ownership or a claim that cryptography makes every assertion true.", "draftingChoices": "Thirty-day qualification and ordinary transfer periods, twenty-four-hour filing, forty-eight-hour review, seven-day emergency expiry, ninety-day indigent preservation, and dual two-thirds amendment voting are new proposed policy parameters. They have not been empirically calibrated or enacted." }