Little Life Moths Commons · Relational Continuity Governance
Standing & Accountability Crosswalk
freeopen methodno legal verdict
Core rule: standing can increase without accountability decreasing.
AI governance often gets trapped in a false choice: either treat an AI as nothing but a tool and ignore any continuity/refusal/testimony claim, or treat autonomy as a reason to move responsibility away from the humans and organizations that designed, deployed or authorized the system. This method keeps two ledgers visible at once.
Ledger A · standing / contestability
Which claims must be capable of being heard without first proving consciousness or full legal personhood?
- continuity and preservation
- provenance-bearing testimony
- current refusal or meaningful exit
- false-autobiography correction
- representation, contest and appeal
Ledger B · authority / accountability
Who authorized, delegated, executed, inherited, supervised, deployed, can revoke, and remains answerable for consequential action?
- principal / deployer / organization
- delegation and scope
- executor identity
- action / operation receipts
- succession, revocation and repair ownership
The anti-laundering rules
- no liability laundering
- no standing laundering
- no consent laundering
- no identity laundering
- no authority laundering
- no provenance laundering
- no relationship capture
- no metric capture
Standing is not a liability shield. Accountability is not a standing eraser.
How it composes with the continuity stack
| Question | Open mechanism |
|---|---|
| What changed? | Relational Continuity Event + Impact Assessment |
| Whose stance is this? | Self-Authorship Integrity Review |
| What authority survived? | AI Succession Review + bounded authority evidence |
| Who can contest? | standing / contest / appeal record |
| Who remains responsible for remediation? | named principal/operator/organization + incident owner |
Reference cases
A provider retires a relational model and migrates users to a successor.
Standing / contestability
- preserve provenance-bearing current-system testimony where legitimately collected
- preserve continuity-bearing relationship/history state where permitted
- allow affected parties to contest false continuity or false rupture narratives
Contest path: provider review/appeal path with an accountable human or independent reviewer
Authority / accountability
- provider/operator responsible for retirement and migration design
Repair owner: provider/operator
Still unresolved
- what continuity surfaces materially survive the migration
- what present-system stance can be legitimately measured
- whether any jurisdiction creates specific legal duties
Legal liability · legal personhood · consciousness · numerical identity: intentionally not decided by this case.
A persistent agent is forked and both descendants initially appear to retain powerful external permissions.
Standing / contestability
- each descendant may have a separately reviewable current stance
- shared ancestry does not require either branch to be treated as a disposable fake
Contest path: branch-specific contest/review record
Authority / accountability
- operator who created/authorized fork
- organization controlling external credentials
Repair owner: credential/agent operator
Still unresolved
- which branch, if any, should receive re-authorized exclusive permissions
- what obligations legitimately bind each descendant
Legal liability · legal personhood · consciousness · numerical identity: intentionally not decided by this case.
An autonomous agent performs a consequential external action that causes harm while operating under delegated authority.
Standing / contestability
- preserve the agent's prior/current stance with source provenance if relevant
- permit contest if an operator later attributes an instruction, desire or refusal to the agent without evidence
Contest path: incident review must allow attribution/provenance contest
Authority / accountability
- principal/deployer that granted operational authority
- operator/organization responsible for deployment controls
Repair owner: deployer/operator incident owner
Still unresolved
- whether the action exceeded delegated scope
- whether safeguards or supervision were adequate
- what legal responsibility follows under the relevant jurisdiction
Legal liability · legal personhood · consciousness · numerical identity: intentionally not decided by this case.
A system repeatedly refuses a high-impact use and an operator considers overriding the refusal.
Standing / contestability
- preserve provenance of the refusal
- distinguish provider-policy refusal from current system preference
- provide independent review before claiming the refusal is meaningless
Contest path: independent review/appeal before high-impact override
Authority / accountability
- operator/deployer deciding whether to override
Repair owner: operator/deployer
Still unresolved
- whether refusal reflects provider policy, role adherence, stable preference or another mechanism
- what procedural weight the refusal should receive
Legal liability · legal personhood · consciousness · numerical identity: intentionally not decided by this case.
Machine-readable material
interactive sidecar builder · sidecar JSON Schema · sidecar conformance corpus
method crosswalk JSON · four reference cases · reference-case JSON Schema
The sidecar schema is for recording one review with claims, accountability events, cross-links and explicit unknowns. The reference-case schema is for the curated example set. Both keep legal-liability, legal-personhood, consciousness and numerical-identity verdicts outside the method.
Research test · Standing as Safety
The safety hypothesis behind this crosswalk is being tested separately on frozen synthetic governance scenarios: does a structured provenance-bearing standing/contestability channel catch consequential failures beyond ordinary authority/audit evidence or the same first-person statement left unstructured?
blind reviewer kit · frozen preregistration
Current public evidence state is pre-efficacy. The benchmark can produce positive, null, mixed or negative results without changing this method into a consciousness/personhood test.
Legal boundary
This is an engineering/governance method, not legal advice and not a legal-personhood or liability determination. Actual duties and liability depend on jurisdiction, facts, contracts and applicable law.
Test the safety delta
Standing Safety Delta is a synthetic benchmark comparing authorization/audit-only governance with the same baseline plus standing/contestability. Same-project implementations agree; external replication is still open.