The Accountability Horizon: An Impossibility Theorem for Governing Human-Agent Collectives

Existing accountability frameworks for AI systems, legal, ethical, and regulatory, rest on a shared assumption: for any consequential outcome, at least one identifiable person had enough involvement and foresight to bear meaningful responsibility. This paper proves that agentic AI systems violate this assumption not as an engineering limitation but as a mathematical necessity once autonomy exceeds a computable threshold. We introduce Human-Agent Collectives, a formalisation of joint human-AI sys

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ethics.ai (9 April 2026), “The Accountability Horizon: An Impossibility Theorem for Governing Human-Agent Collectives,” evidence record 6160, https://ethics.ai/record/6160 (originally published by arXiv).

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