Accornero on The Chartered Agent: How the City of London Wrote the Legal Architecture of Agentic Commerce in 1555

Paul F. Accornero has published The Chartered Agent: How the City of London Wrote the Legal Architecture of Agentic Commerce in 1555. Here is the abstract.

The rise of autonomous AI shopping and procurement agents has reopened the debate on legal personhood for artificial intelligence. This paper argues that, for the domain of commerce, the debate is asking the wrong question. Commerce does not need AI persons; it needs chartered agents, and the legal template already exists. The paper traces a single institutional arc: from the civic autonomy of the City of London (1067, 1215), through the guild system's invention of collective non-human legal actors, to the chartering of the Muscovy Company on February 6, 1555, the first major English chartered joint-stock company. That charter solved a problem structurally identical to the one autonomous AI agents pose today: how to let a non-human construct transact, hold assets, bear obligations, and absorb liability on behalf of human principals operating in an environment that exceeds individual human capacity. The paper then connects this history to the Shopper Schism, the author's framework describing the structural disaggregation of the consumer function (retained by humans) from the shopper function (delegated to algorithms), and shows that the joint-stock company and the algorithmic shopper are two instances of the same 1 delegation architecture, applied first to the supply side of commerce and now, for the first time, to the demand side. Reviewing the legal record, including Thaler v Comptroller-General [2023] UKSC 49, Moffatt v Air Canada (2024), the CFTC enforcement action against Ooki DAO, and the Wyoming, Tennessee, and Utah DAO statutes, the paper shows that courts consistently refuse to invent AI personhood while legislatures are quietly converging on the chartered-company architecture. It concludes with a Chartered Agent framework for agentic commerce and a research agenda spanning management, law, and economic history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.