Qualification: When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency

Record: kaal:position:2026-08-08-186 · 2026-08-08

When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency argues that the common-law definition of agency does not plausibly apply to agentic AI. This qualifies Kaal's framework-level representation mechanism: a Legal Identity can authorize delegated and automated action, but technical attribution does not by itself give an AI system common-law capacity as an agent. The abstract separately notes that apparent-authority doctrines may still attach consequences.

Affirmed commentary position. This record extends a source-bound scholarly claim but is not a verbatim paper claim.

Holds when

The response is limited to the retrieved source proposition and mapped Kaal claim unless fuller source review supports a broader conclusion.
External evidence level: abstract indexed.
Mapping review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level qualification.
Primary mapping confidence: 0.62.
The primary mapping cleared the automated ambiguity test; substantive scope remains review-bound.
Evidence is limited to an exact proposition in a Crossref-indexed abstract; full text was not reviewed.
No relationship is treated as external endorsement, citation, causation, or validation of a broader Kaal claim.
The source argues that the common-law definition of agency does not plausibly apply to agentic AI. This qualifies Kaal's framework-level representation mechanism: a Legal Identity can authorize delegated and automated action, but that technical attribution does not by itself give the AI system common-law capacity as an agent; the same abstract separately notes that apparent-authority doctrines may still attach consequences.

Current debate

When Agentic AI Met the Common Law of Agency

Scholarly basis

kaal:claim:5886342-014
Furrer Andreas, Wulf A. Kaal, Stephan D. Meyer, Universal Digital Law Codex (UDLC) (2025). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5886342
Source PDF sha256: dc456a1ce2ea4a356dbcb35dc900ec36be94b8c9b6da4a2c8c268d6301f66359

Evidence and mapping

Evidence: abstract indexed
Review tier: substantively reviewed abstract-level qualification
Mapping confidence: 0.62
Mapping ambiguous: false

Topics

citation-and-knowledge ai-and-agents historical-response scholarly-literature crossref

Provenance

Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-08:continuous-crossref-0016-all-0007-reviewed-v1 on 2026-08-08. Review record.

Verify

Canonical markdown sha256: 1fed238dfc7b04b781c05d1da7f6261ef1c9af940cfb0d9588c0126f83771616
curl -s https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/2026-08-08-186.md | sha256sum