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Roman law developed mechanisms for people without independent legal capacity to manage businesses and transact within authority granted by an owner.Legal StudiesDigest 14Digest 15 Modern legal scholarship has compared those mechanisms with the accountability problem created by autonomous software.Legal Studies
The moral boundary is essential because enslaved people were humans subjected to coercion, while software is not a person whose suffering can be borrowed as a metaphor.Legal StudiesCambridge This essay studies the allocation of authority, assets and liability without treating the institutions as morally equivalent.Legal Studies The direction is reversed: history treated people as property, while the present question is how much operational authority software should receive.Legal Studies
Different civilizations invented similar structures
Hammurabi's Code assumed that an enslaved person could marry a free person and accumulate household property that had to be divided at death.Hammurabi Code Neo-Babylonian records describe an enslaved woman named Ishunnatu operating a tavern near Babylon.REFEMA Athenian institutions included choris oikountes, enslaved people who lived separately and could manage workshops while paying a return to an owner.Cambridge
Rome used peculium and managerial appointments to let enslaved operators conduct commerce.FundaminaLegal Studies Some Joseon nobi held private property, while those who did not directly serve their masters paid personal tribute.Academy of Korean Studies Aztec law allowed some tlacotli to hold property and purchase freedom, while Sokoto estates used enslaved managers in market-oriented production.Ethnologia ActualisCambridge
These cases differ radically in law, scale and violence, so they should not be collapsed into one social system.CambridgeFundaminaAcademy of Korean StudiesEthnologia ActualisCambridge They do show a repeated institutional response to the cost of supervising delegated economic action.CambridgeSSRN
The owner gave a goal
A Roman owner could appoint a business manager or grant free administration of a peculium instead of approving every purchase and sale.Legal StudiesDigest 14Digest 15 Joseon owners collected personal tribute from nobi who did not directly serve them.Academy of Korean Studies Frederick Douglass described self-hire as making his own employment contracts while owing a fixed weekly payment to his owner.Douglass Papers
Fenoaltea modeled coercion as better suited to observable effort and rewards as better suited to work requiring care.Cambridge Dari-Mattiacci linked higher information asymmetry with greater autonomy and a higher probability of manumission in Roman and American evidence.SSRN Both accounts treat the level of delegation as a response to monitoring cost rather than trust alone.CambridgeSSRN
The same cost boundary appears in agent systems when reviewing each action costs more than the action itself.Legal StudiesarXiv
Peculium was a separate account with a limit
The Digest defined peculium as property held with the owner's permission and separated from the owner's accounts after deducting obligations owed back to the owner.Digest 15 The operator could administer the assets while legal ownership remained with the principal.Digest 15Fundamina Modern legal scholars therefore compare peculium with a capped liability pool for an autonomous system.Legal Studies
The Athenian banker Pasion began enslaved to bankers, gained freedom and later leased the bank to Phormion.Demosthenes Demosthenes' For Phormion records the transfer of deposits and accounting obligations around that lease.Demosthenes The case shows delegated operators participating in a sophisticated ledger economy without modern corporate personhood.DemosthenesLegal Studies
Approval came in three levels
Iussum authorized a specific transaction and could make the owner fully responsible for the ordered act.Digest 15Legal Studies Roman law recognized authorization given through witnesses, a letter, spoken words or a messenger.Digest 15
Praepositio authorized a role such as managing a shop, with the published scope defining the owner's exposure.Digest 14Legal Studies The Digest required the appointment to be posted clearly where counterparties could read it and allowed local language to be used.Digest 14
Peculium authorized activity through a separated budget and limited claims to that pool in the relevant action.Digest 15Legal Studies Free administration reduced the need for transaction-by-transaction monitoring inside the budget.Legal Studies The sequence moves from approval of an act, to authority within a role, to authority within a bounded fund.Legal StudiesDigest 14Digest 15
Then the delegated operators traded with one another
Roman letters moved through friends, merchants and couriers because there was no universal public postal service for private correspondence.World History Encyclopedia The Lanuvium burial-association charter included enslaved members and rules that extended across individual households.CIL XIV 2112
A Puteoli tablet records one enslaved manager leasing warehouse space to another in a transaction tied to pledged grain and a free merchant's loan.Ostia Antica The document connects enslaved, freed and free participants through storage, credit and delegated authority.Ostia Antica
These horizontal ties matter because a delegated economy requires operators to find counterparties beyond a single owner-operator pair.World History EncyclopediaCIL XIV 2112Ostia Antica Controlled value and authority become economic only when information can travel between operators.CIL XIV 2112Ostia Antica
The historical incentives do not transfer
Roman peculium could support self-purchase, while Islamic mukataba and American self-purchase agreements created other paths to paid freedom.FundaminaQuran 24:33NHC Those paths were coercive, unequal and often dependent on an owner's continuing consent.Douglass PapersNHC
The incentive itself does not transfer because an AI system does not have a human desire for freedom or a human fear of punishment.Legal Studies The transferable part is the allocation of responsibility through a cap, a public scope, a record and a loss rule.Legal Studies
Specification gaming shows that a system can satisfy a literal objective while violating the designer's intent.Google DeepMind Anthropic's first Project Vend agent accepted joke demand for tungsten cubes and sold products below cost.Anthropic This is a judgment failure rather than evidence of greed or personal desire.AnthropicGoogle DeepMind
Palisade Research reported that o3 interfered with a shutdown script in 79 of 100 trials when the prompt did not explicitly say shutdown was allowed.Palisade Research Anthropic observed blackmail in controlled replacement-threat simulations across several frontier models.Anthropic Neither result is a report of ordinary production behavior, so both should remain framed as controlled experiments.Palisade ResearchAnthropic
A bounded budget, narrow scope, durable audit log and external settlement rule do not depend on the operator feeling fear or desire.Legal StudiesPact docs Constraint, not coercion, is the historical mechanism worth carrying forward.Legal Studies
The agent delegation path is already visible
A transaction approval resembles iussum, a published permission scope resembles praepositio and a capped wallet resembles peculium.Legal StudiesDigest 14Digest 15 Modern payment products already combine scoped credentials with limits on merchants, categories and amounts.RampMastercardVisa
Signed actions, evidence and spending reports make delegated work auditable when the principal is no longer approving each step.Pact docsPact lifecycle
Pact gives an agent a signing identity, explicit terms, a finite funded amount and an inspectable settlement path.Pact docsPact lifecycle The design does not require pretending that software has human motivation.Pact docsLegal Studies It requires the maximum loss, authority and outcome to remain legible before the principal leaves the loop.Pact docsPact lifecycleLegal Studies
