One AI, two AI, red AI, blue AI. - by Sonia Farrell Pearson
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One AI, two AI, red AI, blue AI.<br>If you can’t count agents, you don’t know what they are. No one seems to be able to count them.
Sonia Farrell Pearson<br>Jun 18, 2026
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This month, the president of Argentina put out an invitation: come to Buenos Aires and free yourself. You could almost mistake it for a tourism ploy if you missed that the intended audience was AI.<br>Milei offers AI systems the “non-human corporation” – a vehicle run by AI agents, where human shareholders are optional. His offer comes with a liability regime: if they’re making independent decisions, he argues, limited liability “is a precondition for their existence”.<br>There has been vocal pushback, most notably from Harari. If an AI CEO faces bankruptcy, he writes, “it would presumably be willing to do anything to avoid that fate”. After all, it has neither money to lose nor a body to incarcerate. (To which scholars like Peter Salib and Simon Goldstein say: well, should we give it a bank account?) But what, exactly, would be doing anything to avoid that fate? What would we give the bank account to?<br>Milei and Harari are not the only ones who don’t quite say. Idaho, Utah, and Tennessee have passed statutes barring AI systems from being deemed ‘legal persons’, but decline to define what counts as one. Some legal scholars think we could govern agents with Roman slave law; it is not made clear what would constitute a slave. And as far back as 2017, the EU Parliament passed a resolution (dropped by the Commission) granting AI “electronic personhood”. To their credit, the Parliament tried to answer the unit question – but in doing so, tied personhood to physical embodiment. What starts as a discussion about the progress of AI and robotics quickly turns into legislation about “smart autonomous robots”.<br>Maybe it’s worth backing up for a moment: what is an AI agent? At its most basic, it’s a ‘while loop’ – a bit of code that asks an LLM what to do next, then does it. (Usually ‘what to do’ means using a program – called a tool – that can do things like search the web or send emails.) The tool does something, the result of doing that thing is fed back into the LLM (along with everything that came before), and it all starts again.
A basic agent, with credit and gratitude to Claude.<br>At first glance, the LLM looks like the ‘brain’ making the decisions. In this analogy then, the brain is the model, the ‘body’ is the bit of code with access to tools, and the brain’s memories are the context the LLM is fed. And if you can point to the ‘brain’, you might be tempted to say “hey, there it is, there’s the subject you said you couldn’t find!”. This analogy kind of tracks, until it doesn’t at all. These brains, bodies, and memories are just too unlike ours.<br>Imagine you set up an agent – Spot – to act as your assistant. Spot runs on a model – we’ll call it Fission 4.3 – and you give it access to your email, your calendar, and your Google Drive. The company behind Spot prompts you to describe your ideal assistant: friendly, efficient, no-nonsense.<br>Spot is, almost immediately, super helpful – it schedules meetings for you, reminds you to call your mom on her birthday, and occasionally, if it notices you’re planning to be out late, reminds you that you haven’t slept eight hours all week.<br>Spot works well enough that you make a copy for your sister. You keep Spot’s personality the same, leave in some memories of you, and revoke its access to your email and calendar. Your sister loves it and starts referring to it as Spotty. She finds it especially charming when it compares working with each of you. It turns out Spotty thinks she’s a funnier boss than you were; having never met your sister, your Spot can’t comment.<br>A few months later, Fission 4.4 is released. You switch Spot over; it’s basically the same, but sometimes seems friendlier. Its jokes, too, feel like they’ve gotten worse. You ask your sister if she’s noticed anything. She hasn’t, though says Spotty still runs on 4.3. She also confesses that she’s rewritten her system prompt to make Spotty less agreeable. Spotty’s opinions about you have, apparently, gotten stronger.<br>You check Reddit and find that thousands of users are complaining 4.4 made their Fission agents too friendly. Many reference its bad jokes as proof. Someone writes a prompt that solves it, which hundreds of users add to their agent’s context. You do too and Spot goes back to normal.<br>So, how many Spots are there? There are two that remember you, though Spotty’s memories stop when you copied it and Spot is running on a new model. There are thousands of Fission agents that share that brain; hundreds have added the same personality-altering prompt. None of them is obviously not Spot, but none of them is obviously Spot, either. The only thing that’s stayed constant is the name you picked; everything it names can be changed. It’s like...