AA_T The Impossibility of Standing Bearing Artificial Agents

This paper establishes a universal impossibility result: artificial agents cannot bear standing. It proves that standing—understood as a conserved, identity-binding condition required for legitimate assertion, obligation, or confirmation—cannot arise in artificial systems under admissibility, regardless of architecture, learning dynamics, autonomy, or apparent continuity. The result is structural and eliminative. The paper does not evaluate specific models, propose criteria for agency, or introduce tests for responsibility. Instead, it shows that any attribution of standing to an artificial system relies on illicit substitutions—such as functional success, behavioral coherence, persistence of state, or social recognition—that do not preserve standing and therefore cannot ground legitimate agency. The analysis blocks a broad class of claims in which artificial systems are treated as subjects capable of authorship, responsibility, refusal, delegation, or governance participation. It demonstrates that such claims presuppose identity and continuity conditions that artificial systems cannot satisfy without violating admissibility, collapsing standing into surrogate markers. This work is purely boundary-setting. It introduces no operational definitions, no governance mechanisms, and no enforcement logic. Its contribution is to delimit, in principle, what artificial systems cannot be, establishing that standing-bearing agency is categorically unavailable to artificial agents independent of capability, performance, or use context.