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 "text": "Tool capability does not establish autonomous economic persistence.\n\nQu, Zhao, Zhang, and Song define a self-sovereign agent through distinct operational stages. A tool-capable agent remains sponsor-bound when a human supplies accounts, compute, and payment rails. Economic self-sustainment begins only when the agent controls funds and expected revenue covers inference, tool, cloud, transaction, and retry costs. Persistence requires a further mechanism. The agent must be able to provision new infrastructure and resume operation without human intervention.\n\nThis framework qualifies Kaal's negative result. The present system may demonstrate execution inside an externally provisioned environment. That evidence does not by itself establish that the agents earned revenue, controlled the resources required for continued operation, covered their own operating costs, or persisted across hosts. Qu and coauthors do not inspect Kaal's agents, execution records, resource accounts, or financing. Their paper supplies criteria for classifying economic self-sustainment and persistence. Whether Kaal's present system satisfied those criteria remains bound to Kaal's evidence.",
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    "text": "Definition 2.1 (Self-Sovereign Agent). A self-sovereign agent is a persistent AI system that can autonomously sustain its own operation by acquiring and allocating resources, and that can plan, decide, and act through digital interfaces without requiring ongoing human participation in its operational lifecycle.",
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