Soulbound AI, Soulbound Robots: How Ethereum's ERC-5192 Creates Fingerprints for Autonomous AI Agents (AI Rights 7)

The previous papers in this series established frameworks for AI economic participation: why control fails, how markets create alignment, how to assess AI readiness, what legal structures enable autonomy, and why insurance provides distributed governance. Each framework assumed a prerequisite that remained unexamined: persistent, verifiable identity enabling AI systems to be individuated, tracked, and held accountable across time. This paper—the seventh in the series—addresses that foundational requirement, providing the infrastructure layer that Papers 1-6 implicitly depended upon. Persistent, non-transferable identity—what this paper terms "soulbound AI" and "soulbound robots"—provides the technical infrastructure necessary for AI legal accountability, economic participation, and insurance-based governance. The argument proceeds through convergent evidence from six domains: legal personhood doctrine demonstrates that identity is pragmatic infrastructure extended for governance purposes; reputation economics mathematically requires identity persistence for cooperation to emerge; EU AI liability frameworks reveal accountability gaps that existing structures cannot close; soulbound token standards provide technical primitives for non-transferable credentials; philosophical analysis from Locke onward establishes identity as the precondition for forensic attribution; and insurance markets—the governance mechanism with greatest promise for AI—fundamentally cannot function without persistent, identifiable entities. The central claim is not that AI systems deserve rights or possess consciousness, but that governance infrastructure requires identifiable subjects capable of accumulating history and bearing consequences. Just as humans do not experience birth certificates and credit histories as oppressive constraints but as keys enabling economic participation, soulbound identity provides AI systems the infrastructure for legitimate participation in economic, legal, and social systems. The alternative—anonymous, ephemeral AI agents operating without accountability—excludes AI from systems requiring trust while creating conditions favoring the underground, unaccountable development that control-based approaches seek to prevent.