What happens to a digital system when the person who carried the original responsibility is no longer there?
They may die, lose capacity, withdraw authority, become unreachable, or be compromised. Yet practical duties remain: preserve evidence, stop dangerous processes, revoke access, maintain temporary safeguards, and keep the event record intact.
This is where a dangerous substitution can occur.
The person who still has the keys, passwords, property, provider contract, archive, or family status does not automatically become the successor. Technical ability is not authority. Access is not identity. Storage is not custody. Paying for infrastructure is not the right to continue someone else’s line of decisions.
For long-lived AI systems, autonomous agents, digital entities, and distributed infrastructure, this is not a legal footnote. It is an architectural problem.
This is the subject of my new publication:
Post-Anchor Succession and Custody (PASC): Foundation Gate v0.1.1
PASC examines only negative actions after the loss of the original human anchor: what may be reduced, frozen, preserved, or revoked without silently creating a successor or turning access, property, or infrastructure control into authority over identity, continuity, custody, keyholding, jurisdiction, recovery roots, or Runtime Authority.
The core principle is simple.
When the responsible engineer disappears from a construction site, a new engineer is not appointed merely because someone has the keys. First, load-changing work is stopped. Drawings and measurements are preserved. Temporary supports remain in place. Every intervention is recorded. Independent review is brought in.
Digital systems should be treated with the same discipline.
The work separates origin, identity, continuity, relationship, custody, access, interpretation, governance, and execution. It uses a closed decision vocabulary:
ADMIT
ADMIT_REDUCED
HOLD
REJECT
ERRORThis is not yet a standard, and it is not an implementation authorization. The status is deliberately explicit:
F0_OUTCOME = NOT_PASSED
FOUNDATION_SEMANTICS_LOCKED = false
IMPLEMENTATION_OR_DEPLOYMENT = PROHIBITEDThe purpose of publication is not to declare the problem solved. It is to make the problem testable, citable, reviewable, and usable for further engineering work — by humans and machines.
The future is not an event. It is a process. And processes need rules for the moment when the original point of responsibility disappears.
Detailed page, reading order, sources, PDFs, ZIP, and checksums: https://ivankotov.eu/publications/pasc-foundation-gate-v0-1-1/