Distributed Legal Infrastructure for a Trustworthy Agentic Web

arXiv:2603.06884 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-03-06 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-03-06

Updated: 2026-09-22

Journal ref: Stanford Journal of AI/Web3 Law and Policy, Kleros-Stanford Symposium Series, Forthcoming (2026)

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: The agentic web marks a structural transition from a human-centered information network to a digital environment populated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that perceive, decide, and act

Terminology

AI Agents — 60× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Accountability — 34× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Agentic AI — 29× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Alignment — 27× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Actor — 19× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Agentic System — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Multi-Agent System — 13× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Agentic AI systems — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Core — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
AI Literacy — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Addressability — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Trace — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Explainability — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Information Asymmetry — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Large Language Model — 4× in this paper
Verification — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Aggregation — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Multi-Agent Framework — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Grounding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Hallucination — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
Knowledge Graph — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
Knowledge graphs — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Ontology — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Resource Description Framework — 2× in this paper
Robustness — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Scaffolding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Universal Digital Law Codex — 2× in this paper
Agent-based modeling — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Agentic AI Governance Assurance and Trust Engine — 1× in this paper
Automated Identification System — 1× in this paper
Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Contextual Understanding — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Distributional Artificial General Intelligence — 1× in this paper
Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Formal Methods — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Inverse Problem — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Large Language Model (LLM) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
Local Optimization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Perplexity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Physical Constraints — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
RAG — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — 1× in this paper · explained in 16 episodes
Structured Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Theoretical Guarantees — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Transferability — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
Verifiability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Abstract

The agentic web marks a structural transition from a human-centered information network to a digital environment populated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that perceive, decide, and act autonomously. As delegated action unfolds at machine speed, exceeds discrete moments of human judgment, and distributes decision-making across non-human actors, existing legal frameworks face growing strain, creating an urgent need for new mechanisms capable of sustaining legality in this emerging order. A trustworthy agentic web therefore depends on the infrastructuring of legality through interoperable protocols that organize identity, delegation, and accountability across systems, enabling coherent governance beyond isolated platforms. Towards this end, this article advances a distributed legal infrastructure (DLI), a governance paradigm composed of five interlocking layers: (1) self-sovereign, soulbound agent identities; (2) cognitive AI logic and constraint systems; (3) decentralized adjudication mechanisms for dispute resolution; (4) bottom-up agentic market regulation to mitigate information asymmetries and network effects, including insurance-based models; and (5) portable institutional frameworks that enable legal interoperability while preserving plural sources of authority. This reference framework contributes to emerging research on embedding legality within agentic web infrastructure, aligning distributed technical systems with accountability, contestability, and rule-of-law principles.

Distributed Legal Infrastructure for a Trustworthy Agentic Web

Terminology

Abstract

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