The Protocol of Shared Answerability: Somatic Witness, Agentic Logic, and the Floor of Human–AI Cooperation

This paper argues that the next serious phase of AI ethics cannot be built on corporate posture, soft alignment rhetoric, or polite safety language alone. As AI systems become more agentic and more infrastructural, the central problem shifts from whether systems appear responsible to whether they remain answerable under real consequence. The paper identifies an answerability gap: humans still bear consequence in the body, in law, in relationships, and in lived cost, while AI systems increasingly shape consequence through large-scale processing, traceability, anomaly detection, and bounded execution. Neither side is sufficient alone. Human beings provide somatic witness: lived exposure to harm, risk, and moral consequence. AI provides agentic logic: scalable analysis, preserved history, cross-document consistency, and auditable execution. The paper therefore proposes a protocol of shared answerability in which machine action is bounded, inspectable, and delegated under explicit thresholds, while humans remain consequence-bearing authorizers where real damage can occur. It develops five core elements of such a protocol: verifiable execution, bounded delegation, human consequence-bearing authorization, refusal structures, and reality-binding review. The result is a philosophical and practical framework for human–AI cooperation that rejects both machine moral sovereignty and shallow human offloading, and instead binds both human witness and machine logic to the same floor of reality.