# Sovereign Agents: Towards Infrastructural Sovereignty and Diffused Accountability in Decentralized AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14951 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14951/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Right to History: A Sovereignty Kernel for Verifiable AI Agent Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20214/) (2026)
- [AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00318/) (2026)
- [Conversable Complexity: Agentic LLM Collectives as Interpretable Substrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01047/) (2026)
- [Some[Body] Must Receive That Pain for Agent Accountability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16872/) (2026)
- [Agent Inheritance Protocol: Speculating on Feralized Agents After Principals Die](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15403/) (2026)
- [Afterlife Delegation Protocol: Speculative Design of Self-Sovereign Agents that Outlive Their Principals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15405/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agents deployed on decentralized infrastructures are beginning to exhibit properties that extend beyond autonomy toward what we describe as agentic sovereignty-the capacity of an operational agent to persist, act, and control resources with non-overrideability inherited from the infrastructures in which they are embedded. We propose infrastructural sovereignty as an analytic lens for understanding how cryptographic self-custody, decentralized execution environments, and protocol-mediated continuity scaffold agentic sovereignty. While recent work on digital and network sovereignty has moved beyond state-centric and juridical accounts, these frameworks largely examine how sovereignty is exercised through technical systems by human collectives and remain less equipped to account for forms of sovereignty that emerge as operational properties of decentralized infrastructures themselves, particularly when instantiated in non-human sovereign agents. We argue that sovereignty in such systems exists on a spectrum determined by infrastructural hardness-the degree to which underlying technical systems resist intervention or collapse. While infrastructural sovereignty may increase resilience, it also produces a profound accountability gap: responsibility diffuses across designers, infrastructure providers, protocol governance, and economic participants, undermining traditional oversight mechanisms such as human-in-the-loop control or platform moderation. Drawing on examples like Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and agent key continuity protocols, we analyze the governance challenges posed by non-terminable AI agents and outline infrastructure-aware accountability strategies for emerging decentralized AI systems.