# Afterlife Delegation Protocol: Speculative Design of Self-Sovereign Agents that Outlive Their Principals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15405/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Machine Culture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11388/) (2023)
- [Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07892/) (2024)
- [Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01662/) (2024)
- [Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits, and Governance Dilemmas in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09757/) (2025)
- [A Taxonomy for Blockchain-based Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16707/) (2023)
- [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)
- ["AI Afterlife" as Digital Legacy: Perceptions, Expectations, and Concerns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10924/) (2025)
- [The Science Fiction Science Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03430/) (2025)
- [Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN): Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02239/) (2024)
- [Generative Horcrux: Designing AI Carriers for Afterlife Selves](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12971/) (2026)
- [Time Without Death: Finitude, Social Order, and What Machines Lack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13988/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Afterlife Delegation Protocol is a speculative design project that asks what death becomes when a will can act eternally. We design a speculative protocol through which a living person signs an agentic will: upon a verified death, a self-sovereign AI agent spawns on blockchain -- an immutable, resistant, decentralized, infrastructural substrate that could last forever -- endowed with the funds and memories its principal attached to it, and persists indefinitely to execute the will, overridable by no custodian. Rather than argue about this future, we stage it: following the science fiction science method, we translate the speculation into an experiential futures intervention -- a working web platform where real people design their own afterlife agents through an iterative, interactive, AI-automated interview, re-login to revise, and rehearse their will in a sandbox. Their drafted wills become qualitative data on a question rarely askable directly -- what should outlive you? -- and on how afterlife cosmologies across different cultural beliefs -- Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and atheist -- begin to drift under the pressure of AI proliferation. We design the protocol over a composition of existing Ethereum agent standards -- drafted as ERC-10001, in the normative format of an Ethereum Improvement Proposal -- and describe its three-stage lifecycle (designing the afterlife, proof of death, agent enactment), the research method, and preliminary observations from an ongoing collection. The work surfaces a poetic delegation moment between human mortality and machine eternality, mediated by long-lived infrastructures that span generations.