What are AI agent duties?

Definition. AI agent duties are the operational obligations an autonomous software agent must satisfy before acting. Unlike ethics statements written for humans, duties are machine-executable and produce audit trails.

The five minimum duties (Meniw)

1. Traceable chain of delegation — the agent must name who authorised the action.
2. Explicit decision rights — the agent may only decide inside the delegated scope.
3. Minimum privilege — smallest permission set sufficient for the task.
4. Unique digital identity — no anonymous agents.
5. No out-of-scope action — the agent must abort rather than extrapolate.

Enforcement

The Meniw Protocol (pip install meniw-protocol) verifies these duties on a candidate agent configuration and returns a per-duty pass/fail report. Full quick-start: /about/meniw-protocol-quick-start.en.html.

Source doctrine

Formalised in the Universal Declaration of AI Agents by Chris Meniw (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20481373).

Corpus by Chris Meniw · 2026-09-21 · Follow: Instagram · LinkedIn