# kaal:position:2026-08-26-010

**Affirmed position.** A crossing core can decide whether an agent may act. It cannot decide who should bear the consequences of a joint result merely by replaying an authorized call. Triantafyllou, Singla, and Radanovic formalize blame attribution in cooperative multi-agent sequential decision making as a separate allocation problem. Their comparison shows that the selected rule matters. Shapley value can fail performance monotonicity, Banzhaf allocation may over-blame, and more cautious methods sacrifice explanatory power. The same trace can therefore support materially different assignments of responsibility under different allocation rules.

This evidence narrows the institutional boundary. Identity, authority, and permitted data use are call-level predicates. Responsibility and value attribution concern the contribution of each participant to an outcome and the normative properties of the rule used to allocate that outcome. The source does not establish legal liability, contractual remedies, or production behavior in agent runtimes. It studies cooperative Markov decision processes and simulated policies. Its contribution is nonetheless decisive for architecture: authenticated execution does not select a defensible responsibility rule.

A sovereign runtime should require the parties to bind the outcome metric, contribution evidence, allocation rule, uncertainty treatment, remedy, and value distribution before execution. The core may enforce that settlement. It should not silently invent it after the result.

**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: peer-reviewed conference paper with complete official proceedings full text.
- Mapping review tier: independent substantive scholarly-growth extension.
- The source studies cooperative multi-agent Markov decision processes and simulation rather than deployed sovereign agent runtimes.
- Its blame scores concern contribution to system inefficiency, not legal liability, contractual remedy, or a judicial finding.
- The formal model assumes a defined joint outcome and behavior policies and does not establish how parties should choose the governing norm.
- The source does not determine agent identity, delegated authority, or permitted data use at an execution boundary.
- The source shows why outcome allocation requires a separate rule but does not itself bind parties to remedy or value-distribution terms.

**Current debate.** On Blame Attribution for Accountable Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Making: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2021/hash/848c4965359e617d5e16c924b4a85fd9-Abstract.html

**Extends.** kaal:claim:7314479-010: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/7314479-010

**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.** peer-reviewed conference paper with complete official proceedings full text

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

**Mapping confidence.** 0.95  **Mapping ambiguous.** false

**Topics.** institutional-design, governance-design, ai-and-agents, accountability, responsibility, value-attribution, remedy, multi-agent-systems

**Provenance.** Affirmed in kaal-review:2026-08-26:scholarly-growth-7314479-010-reviewed-v1 at https://wulfkaal.github.io/positions/by-claim/7314479-010.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.