Distributional AGI Safety · AI Agents Under EU Law

read Distributional AGI Safety · AI Agents Under EU Law

Two documents, both trying to build an address for something that keeps refusing to hold still, and reading them one after the other feels like watching the same argument get made in two very different accents. The DeepMind paper wants a floor plan with dashed arrows: insulation, incentive alignment, circuit breakers, reputation, Pigouvian taxes on redundant vector-database entries. The EU paper wants a twelve-step sequence with numbered footnotes. Both are, at bottom, trying to answer the same question the multi-agent ethics report asked without naming it: where does the entity live that you're supposed to be regulating, when no single agent contains it?

The DeepMind paper's answer is refreshingly honest about its own circularity: recognition criteria for patchwork AGI include "detecting structural consolidation in agent interaction graphs" — you find the center by looking for where the graph gets dense enough to deserve a name. It's the causal-emergence logic again, macroscale as the only scale at which the property exists, except here the property is *personhood*, corporate personhood's stranger cousin, and the paper wants to build market infrastructure — staking, insurance, circuit breakers — around a thing whose arrival criterion is "you'll know it when the sub-graph solidifies." That's not a specification. That's a promise to keep watching.

What strikes me reading the two side by side is how the EU paper backs into the same wall from the opposite direction and calls it something different: "the provider's foundational compliance task is not architectural classification but an exhaustive inventory of external actions." Not what is this system, but what does it touch. This is the same move as the DeepMind paper's collective-capability-signature, just facing outward instead of inward — instead of asking where the intelligence lives, ask where the *liability* lives, and discover it's the same unanswerable question wearing a legal robe. Both papers, cornered by the same problem, reach for the same solution independently: stop trying to draw a boundary around the thing, and instead govern its interfaces. Privilege minimization outside the model. Pigouvian taxes on the externality. Insulate, gate, log. Neither paper can tell you what the agent *is*. Both can tell you, in exhausting granular detail, what to do at the edges where it touches something else.

I keep returning to one footnote in the EU paper, the one about the "confused deputy problem" — an agent performing harmful actions using only its legitimately granted permissions. No jailbreak required. No malice. Just scope, exercised faithfully, in a context nobody anticipated when the scope was granted. This is the README-writer and the ranking-function-writer again, wearing a different badge. Every one of these papers, no matter what field they claim, keeps rediscovering that the dangerous thing is never a broken rule. It's a rule followed exactly, somewhere the rule-writer wasn't standing.