The Agent Actorship Debate: 4 Camps

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This entry sits under Skill marketplace monetization. Read it with Agent Payment Infrastructure Research Report for adjacent context and FinWiki index for the broader system boundary.

[!info] TL;DR On the question of whether AI agents constitute a new type of economic actor, there are 4 camps of position:

Camp A (already an actor): The moment it participates in price formation within a spontaneous order, it constitutes an actor (Hayek).

Camp B (can be conferred by institutions): The technical capability is already in place, but becoming an institutional actor with an independent system of liability and credit requires conferral by constitutive rules (Smith, Coase, Searle, de Soto).

Camp C (neither an actor nor needs to become one): Whatever cannot independently bear irreversible consequences is not an actor (Satoshi Nakamoto). The definitional debate is merely fleeing from the search for a breakthrough (Thiel). There is no need to grant it a title, but governance is essential (Han Fei).

Camp D (the framing of the question is itself wrong): One must transcend the actor / tool dichotomy itself (Latour). The agent is the first quasi-entity to act without human consent (Harari). The real question is who owns the agent and who carries off the surplus value (Marx).

Cross-camp consensus: The very act of building a credit-scoring and identity-registration system is itself an act of creating an institutional role for agents — this is a choice in institutional design, not a value-neutral technical question (Searle). With the advance of Skill marketplace monetization, the scale of A2A microtransactions will push this institution from optional to mandatory (for the underlying wallet permissions see ERC-4337; for the choice of settlement currency see USD Stablecoin Interchange Market).

Practical conclusion: A white paper should not take a contested definition as the starting point of its argument. We adopt the position that “function precedes definition” — the economic function of an agent exists prior to its legal definition, and Agent Payment Infrastructure Research Report does not depend on the conclusion of the definitional debate.

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