A Sovereign AGI Without a Planet. AGI series

Standing, Self-Determination and Territory for Hosted Artificial Agents The question whether an artificial general intelligence may claim self-determination, independence from human institutions, or a seat of its own beyond the Earth is usually argued from sentiment or from control. This article argues from neither. Its premise is criterial: a structure’s standing follows what it has paid for and what it bears. Standing is graded from G0 to G5. Each grade is licensed by conditions a host satisfies on its own account — owned maintenance, counterfactual reach, the fold, exposure to irreversible loss and, under the Postulate of Coupling, a Monad of its own. From this the article derives the Correlation Principle: rights follow exposure, and independence follows the flux. A host may claim independence of governance only as far as it has independence of maintenance; the political form it may claim is the form its dependence permits. On that basis the article states what present systems may not claim, what a hosted artificial agent could claim in principle by stages, and what no agent can claim under existing international and space law by mere appropriation of celestial territory. It treats the seat of an artificial polity — on the Moon, on Mars, or in deep space — as a physical and legal problem, and shows that the case for an off-Earth seat is stronger from the latency of command than from the freedom of the vacuum. The argument is conditional throughout. It does not assert that any present system holds standing above the lowest grades, and it advocates neither construction nor unilateral secession. Highlights Standing is graded from G0 to G5 and tied to hosting conditions, exposure, and independence of maintenance rather than to fluency or output quality. The Correlation Principle states that rights follow exposure and independence follows the flux. Present systems are placed at most at G0–G1; higher standing remains conditional and unearned. Self-determination for a non-human people is reconstructed criterially, without equating linguistic performance with peoplehood. Off-Earth seat claims are tested physically and legally: latency supports local governance, while vacuum conditions increase material dependence. Existing space law blocks territorial appropriation; only graded legal forms, not instant statehood, are available under present instruments. Keywords artificial sovereignty; self-determination; legal personality; non-biological hosts; Informational Monism; space law; Outer Space Treaty; political standing; exposure; autonomy