Pith Number

pith:ZFH5C5XN

pith:2026:ZFH5C5XNZOR6G5G5HG3L4OISQ2

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Some[Body] Must Receive That Pain for Agent Accountability

Botao Amber Hu, Helena Rong

AI agents cause harm but lack any persistent body to receive consequences and change behavior, so high-stakes use must stay tethered to human principals.

arxiv:2605.16872 v1 · 2026-05-16 · cs.CY · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{ZFH5C5XNZOR6G5G5HG3L4OISQ2}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Achieving consequence-agency coupling is therefore a sociotechnical infrastructural problem, not only a legal one. Until such architectures exist, high-stakes AI deployment should remain tethered to accountable human principals with meaningful control, proportional liability, and authority to constrain or terminate the agent.

C2weakest assumption

The assumption that pain, understood mechanistically as a corrective feedback signal, is foundational to canonical theories of punishment and requires a continuing locus (body) for effective consequence reception in AI agents.

C3one line summary

AI agents lack the persistent identity and feedback mechanisms needed for consequence reception, requiring new architectures or continued human accountability.

References

107 extracted · 107 resolved · 8 Pith anchors

[1] Artificial Intelligence and Law , volume= 2017

[2] 2019 , month = nov, url = 2018

[3] UC Davis Law Review , volume= 2019

[4] Nature Human Behaviour , volume= 2018

[5] Psychological Science , volume= 2004

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:03:27.496479Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

c94fd176edcba3e374dd39b6be3912869116995d18678dfadcda42f5aaaf6011

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.16872 · arxiv_version: 2605.16872v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.16872 · pith_short_12: ZFH5C5XNZOR6 · pith_short_16: ZFH5C5XNZOR6G5G5 · pith_short_8: ZFH5C5XN

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/ZFH5C5XNZOR6G5G5HG3L4OISQ2 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: c94fd176edcba3e374dd39b6be3912869116995d18678dfadcda42f5aaaf6011

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "e3413f87b5f98e768b9479ffe9e61bde4ffe220833528c4c547001a84442c182",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CY",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-16T08:24:06Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "69dc3e7b713be614f523949b3f67252bcce59d2167039100088a9ee4f91f1ffb"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.16872",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}