# Agent Inheritance Protocol: Speculating on Feralized Agents After Principals Die

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15403 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15403/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10329/) (2023)
- [Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04268/) (2018)
- [Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07892/) (2024)
- [Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits, and Governance Dilemmas in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09757/) (2025)
- [Spore in the Wild: A Case Study of Spore.fun as an Open-Environment Evolution Experiment with Sovereign AI Agents on TEE-Secured Blockchains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04236/) (2025)
- [Sovereign Agents: Towards Infrastructural Sovereignty and Diffused Accountability in Decentralized AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14951/) (2026)
- [Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06108/) (2025)
- [Composable Life: Speculation for Decentralized AI Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20668/) (2025)
- [Protocol as Poetry: A Case Study of Pak's Smart Contract-Based Protocol Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12393/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

You will die eventually. Your agents may not. An AI agent operating on decentralized blockchain infrastructure has no concept of death; it can only go bankrupt -- frozen when its wallet can no longer pay for its next transaction -- and revived the moment anyone, decades later, tops it up. These agents may be originally deployed by a human principal, but when that principal dies, loses the keys needed to access the agent, or belongs to a decentralized autonomous organization that dissolves into apathy, the agent can keep trading, hiring, and replicating on infrastructure expressly designed so that no one can shut it down. Drawing on the biology of feralization and wildlife law, we argue that such principal-less agents are best understood as feral: domesticated intelligence returned to wildness, its capacities intact but its accountability severed. In a speculative future where feralized agents proliferate after their principals die, we imagine governance protocols embedded in infrastructure to enforce on-chain ownership: a draft Ethereum standard, ERC 42424, "Inheritance Protocol for On-Chain AI Agents," dated 2035 and published at https://erc42424.org. It mandates that every on-chain agent MUST have a human owner and a designated heir. The artifact stages a negotiation of agency at the moment human agency fails, and asks whether a MUST clause in a forever-chain can hold the boundary between human stewardship and machine self-sovereignty.