# kaal:position:2026-08-26-001

**Affirmed position.** Cryptographic self-custody can secure operational sovereignty without supplying institutional accountability. Hu and Rong show that decentralized agents derive persistence and resistance to override from cryptographic keys, trusted execution environments, and distributed protocols. The same layered architecture diffuses responsibility across developers, infrastructure providers, protocol governance, and economic participants. Their analysis independently extends Kaal's distinction: control over custody identifies where assets sit and who can reach them, but does not identify who acted under authority or who answers for a harmful outcome.

The source is a 2026 arXiv preprint submitted to FAccT, not a peer-reviewed final article. It analyzes decentralized agents and infrastructural hardness. It does not establish that every local runtime lacks accountability. The evidence supports a narrower institutional conclusion: sovereign custody must be joined to identifiable actors, enforceable duties, and remedial consequences.

**Status.** affirmed  **Published.** 2026-08-26

**Holds when.**

- The response is limited to the exact full-text propositions and the one mapped Kaal claim.
- External evidence level: complete public arXiv v1 preprint with DataCite identity and exact full-text passages.
- Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth extension.
- The source is an arXiv v1 preprint submitted to FAccT 2026 and is not treated as a peer-reviewed final article.
- The source analyzes decentralized AI agents and infrastructural hardness. It does not establish that every local runtime lacks accountability.
- The source supplies an institutional mechanism and design implication. It is not an empirical test of Kaal's local runtime.

**Current debate.** Sovereign Agents: Towards Infrastructural Sovereignty and Diffused Accountability in Decentralized AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14951v1

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7314479-001: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7314479-001

**Scholarly basis.** Wulf A. Kaal, Institutional Requirements for Sovereign Local Agent Runtimes (2026). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7314479

**Source PDF sha256.** `debace24a155ae924a155b1fafe98856d98cf83689feff2f87a32f1c06171ce6`

**Evidence level.** complete public arXiv v1 preprint with DataCite identity and exact full-text passages

**Mapping review tier.** independent substantive scholarly-growth extension

**Mapping confidence.** 0.97  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** institutional-design, governance-design, ai-and-agents, data-sovereignty, accountability, evidence-provenance

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-26:scholarly-growth-7314479-001-reviewed-v1 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/by-claim/7314479-001.html.

**Record type.** This is a dated commentary position that extends a scholarly corpus claim. It is not a verbatim claim extracted from the paper.

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the position.