Concept Explainer · Authority Does Not Travel by Default
The multi-source model, explained
A concise reference for readers who want the core distinctions without reading the full paper.
Why isn't ownership a good master variable?
Ownership appears to simplify the problem: if the state belongs to the person, access, correction, portability, and deletion might seem to follow from one rule. But existing information law routinely separates these — a statutory right to access data does not mean you own all data about you, and access, correction, deletion, and portability operate under different rules even for the same information.
What is the multi-source, multi-incident model?
Authority over a piece of relationship state can come from several sources at once — consent, contract, statute, institutional role, fiduciary duty, delegation, court order, guardianship, or confidentiality — and each source can govern a different incident of use: disclosure, correction, restriction, deletion, retention, migration, delegation, action, audit, or challenge. The model prevents a continuity system from compressing all of these into a single portable “authorized” status.
What is retained-but-non-operative state?
An architectural condition in which a record survives — for a legitimate historical, legal, or audit purpose — while its ordinary authority to affect current interaction has been removed or narrowed. The paper is explicit that this is a descriptive term, not a new legal category: deletion cannot serve as the universal response to lost authority, because some records must be preserved even after they stop being operative.
What is destination-side revalidation?
The idea that a receiving system should evaluate whether asserted authority remains operative for its own proposed operation, rather than simply verifying that a source-side assertion is technically valid. A technically valid credential can be accurate and still insufficient at the destination — the recipient's role, purpose, or jurisdiction may have changed.
What is actually claimed?
That persistent human–AI relationship state can combine heterogeneous objects governed by several legal sources at once, and that a continuity architecture should preserve enough legally material provenance and authority-state information for a receiving system to evaluate current operability — not that this is a new legal right or doctrine.
What remains unproven?
Whether existing mature mechanisms (already reviewed in the paper) can be combined into one sufficient cross-provider architecture, or whether a genuine gap remains, is exactly the question the paper leaves open and invites future work to close.
Where can readers go deeper?
The canonical paper record · Research brief · The boundary-findings map · Persistent Primitive (Paper 2) · Governing Relationship State (Paper 4) · Human Authority
Preble, Micheal Charles. “Authority Does Not Travel by Default: Legal Provenance and Revalidation in Persistent Human–AI Continuity” Available at SSRN 7359661, 2026.