Accountability (attribution)

The fourth and newest family of Sybil-resistance: binding an actor — human or AI agent — to a responsible principal who can be identified, sanctioned, and removed. It reframes the door question for the agentic era from "are you human?" (neither necessary nor sufficient once benign agents act for accountable people) to "who is answerable for this?" Industry expressions include staking-and-slashing, Vouched's "Know Your Agent" (launched May 22, 2025), and the OpenAI/Stripe Agentic Commerce Protocol. It is EigenTrust's "ban the actor, not the artifact" carried one era forward.