Agent Inheritance Protocol: Speculating on Feralized Agents After Principals Die

You will die eventually. Your agents may not. An AI agent operating on de- centralized 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 origi- nally 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 feral- ized agents proliferate after their principals die, we imagine governance protocols embedded in infrastructure to enforce on-chain ownership: a draft Ethereum stan- dard, 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.