When Intelligence Becomes Agency: A Theory of Governed, Proactive Agency for Symbiotic AI Systems
Researchers propose a formal framework for governed proactive AI agency, linking activation decisions to continuing authorization, accountability, and bounded delegation in symbiotic systems.
The paper defines the activation problem: persistent AI assistants must decide whether a situation warrants behavior, and whether to act, ask, monitor, defer, or deliberately refrain. It distinguishes autonomous from delegated agency and defines symbiotic agency as delegation under a standing, revocable mandate, coupled to the principal's situation with calibrated inference and bounded personalization. The framework links activation decisions to authorized perception, behavior selection, authority containment, traceable restraint, and constrained adaptation, and provides an agency classification method, evaluation framework, benchmark scenarios, and reference architecture for always-present assistants and embodied support systems.