The Agency Gap: Governing Personal AI Agents
Delegated Authority, Capability Portability, and Individual Sovereignty
Abstract
Personal AI agents mark a structural transition in digital intermediation. Conventional platforms primarily organize information, attention, ranking, recommendation, matching, and market access. Increasingly capable AI agents can go further: they can communicate, negotiate, purchase, schedule, coordinate, and execute actions on behalf of individuals. This transition shifts the governance problem from the architecture of choice toward the architecture of delegated agency. This paper develops the concept of the Agency Gap: the institutional distance between the capability and authority delegated to an artificial agent and the effective control retained by the individual on whose behalf that agent acts. The framework distinguishes Agent Capability (AC), Delegated Authority (DA), and Effective Individual Control (EC). It argues that technological capability and individual sovereignty need not increase together: when capability and delegated authority grow faster than effective individual control, assistance can evolve into delegated dependence. The paper integrates adjacent literatures on agentic profiles, principal–agent governance, meaningful human control, human autonomy, interoperability, and portability. Its contribution is not a priority claim over those literatures. Rather, it shifts the unit of analysis to the institutional relationship among the individual principal, the agent, the provider, and external platforms. It connects the Agency Gap to capability portability and personal capability continuity, meaningful exit, cognitive sovereignty, fiduciary loyalty, execution provenance, and reciprocal interoperability. Meta’s 2026 Muse ecosystem is used as a contemporary stress test rather than as the evidentiary foundation of the theory. The central policy objective is capability expansion without sovereignty contraction. The paper therefore proposes a Fiduciary Agent Architecture in which increasing delegation is matched by effective institutional control. Its governing proposition is simple: the agent must be loyal to the person, not merely personalized for the person.
Keywords
AI agents; Agency Gap; delegated authority; effective individual control; capability portability; cognitive sovereignty; fiduciary agents; interoperability; individual sovereignty
Suggested Citation
Version History
Version 1.0 — September 2026. Initial public working-paper release.
Journal Status
A journal-submission version is in preparation. This record will be updated only after an actual submission or publication-status change.