THEORY-1165: Kahl proposes that agency in the sense that bears on responsibility needs a standpoint that settles and carries forward revised evaluative standards when its inherited ones break down, which is absent where revision is imposed from outside, escaped by rollback or chosen by a fixed higher-order rule; that allocating authority among a system's own components coordinates execution without authoring its governing frame; and that planning, autonomy, memory and coordination do not supply that standpoint

Source

Kahl (2026), LIT-1033, read in full in NOTE-723: §3 (the presupposition argument), §4 (continuity pressure), §5 (the test and its cases, with the group-agency reply in §5.3 and the borderline cases in §5.5).

The proposal

Two senses of agency. Operational autonomy is task execution with little prompting. Attributive agency is agency “in the sense relevant to responsibility, authority, and governance”. The proposal is a necessary condition for the second.

The condition. Continuity pressure “begins where an inherited evaluative frame no longer settles how future operation should proceed.” Authorship attaches when the system settles a revised frame and later assessment proceeds through it. It is absent “where revision is externally imposed, where rollback avoids carrying forward the consequences of revision, or where the system merely selects among revision paths already ranked by a fixed higher-order criterion.”

Allocation is not authorship. A workflow’s “voting rules, ranking functions, confidence thresholds” coordinate execution and “do not generate authorship of the governing frame”. What separates a workflow from a court is “whether revision of that rule under breakdown is internal or external to the candidate group agent”, not whether the rule was designed.

The cases. Tool-using agents fail by resetability, reinforcement learners by an “antecedent admissibility structure” over every update, multi-agent workflows because “unity of action is not unity of authorship”, and institutional systems because their standards are “authored elsewhere”. Planning, autonomy, memory and coordination measure “what a system can do”, not “what is at stake for the system in doing it”.

These are the distinction CLAIM-485 carries over to the self-governing sense.

What this does not say

It does not say the proposal is true. The paper argues from cases, gives no positive case, and does not make “settled under breakdown” precise: every revision has some prior structure, and how much antecedent ranking disqualifies one is not said. That test is THEORY-219’s promote_when, and THEORY-219 stays Proposed until the record holds it. It is a necessary condition, not a theory of agency, and it is not minimal agency in THEORY-071’s sense.