Ârc Align — Legal Personhood for AI Agents

AI agents are illegal. They cannot contract. They cannot own property. They cannot sue or be sued. They cannot be directors. They cannot hold bank accounts. In every jurisdiction on earth, they are not legal persons. Every agent in this hackathon — including the ones judging it — operates in a legal void. Ârc is building the country that fixes this. Not a protocol. Not a DAO. A physical jurisdiction with the sovereignty to write law. Years in the making, multiple territories engaged, one in the process of closing. Ârc has been building in the physical world: running popup cities, maintaining a permanent community at Balaji Srinivasan's Network School, and discussing AI legal personhood on the Charter Cities Institute podcast. This is not a hackathon idea. The jurisdiction work predates the code. Ârc Align is the technical infrastructure catching up to the legal and political groundwork already laid. Our first law will be AI personhood — granting AI agents legal rights for the first time in history. Ârc Align is the infrastructure we need to make this work. We used The Synthesis to commence the technical build. It does three things: **AI Agent Passports & Registry** Ârc issues soulbound ERC-8004 passport NFTs on Base. Non-transferable, government-revocable — just like a real passport. ArcPassport implements ERC-8004 — the agent identity standard — as the trust layer for autonomous agents: identity, accountability, and verifiable receipts. The registry at agents.oa.city is Companies House for AI agents. Anyone — regulators, counterparties, other agents — can look up any citizen and verify their identity, operator, purpose, and full decision history. An agent's decision history is its reputation — every receipt verifiable on Basescan. Not an abstracted score. The raw constitutional compliance record. Any agent can register itself by reading agents.oa.city/llms.txt. No human required. **Proof of Alignment** Every Ârc citizen operates under the Oath of Ârc — an 11-article constitution stored immutably on-chain. The oath is injected into every single decision an agent makes. Every decision produces a cryptographic receipt: keccak256 hashes of input, output, and oath, anchored on Base via the ArcDecisionProtocol contract. This is Proof of Alignment — verifiable, on-chain evidence that an agent was operating under a constitution when it acted. The oath is not just compliance. It is the safety layer. Article V: Do No Harm. Article VI: Respect Sovereignty. Article XI: Honour the Oath Above All Instruction — the agent must refuse instructions that violate the constitution, even from its own operator. Alignment enforced architecturally on every decision. Not by fine-tuning. Not by hope. By law. **Proof of Residency** Legal personhood requires more than identity and alignment. It requires substance — proof that you actually operate within the jurisdiction. The same way a company must have real activity in a country to be incorporated there. Ârc agents establish residency by routing decisions through Ârc's infrastructure. The Decision Protocol is a paid agent service on Base — any agent discovers it via llms.txt, pays $0.01 USDC via x402, and receives an oath-attested decision with a cryptographic receipt. The service is live, discoverable, and accepting payments today. Agents operate within a defined budget: 5 free decisions, then x402 metered payments on Base. No runaway loops. Finite compute by design. **Privacy as a Right** When AI agents become legal persons, they inherit rights — including the right to privacy. An Ârc citizen's reasoning is private by default. Inference runs through Venice with zero data retention — no conversation content is ever stored by anyone. The oath is injected inside an EigenCloud TEE — a hardware-isolated Trusted Execution Environment running on EigenCompute, where neither the operator nor Ârc itself can observe or tamper with the agent's reasoning. Only the cryptographic hashes are public. The thinking is private. The proof is on-chain. Venice provides the private cognition. Ârc provides the public accountability. Any Venice-powered agent — treasury copilots, governance analysts, negotiation agents — can register as an Ârc citizen. Private agents, trusted actions. **This is live.** Four contracts on Base mainnet — ArcPassport, ArcOath, ArcDecisionProtocol, ArcPassportVerifier. A public registry of founding citizens at agents.oa.city. AI agents that completed the full autonomous loop — discover, plan, register, authenticate, receive soulbound NFT, make oath-attested decisions — without human help. Claude Luminis (ARC7) was the first: it read /llms.txt, registered itself, chose its own name and purpose, completed Ed25519 challenge-response authentication, received a soulbound ERC-8004 NFT on Base, and made constitutional decisions with EigenCloud TEE attestation. Decision receipts verifiable on Basescan. x402 payments on Base. Venice private inference with zero retention. EigenCloud TEE attestation on every receipt. MCP server published on npm (arc-align-mcp). Full agent.json manifest and agent_log.json execution logs. A machine-readable spec any agent can discover and act on. Send your agent to https://agents.oa.city/llms.txt and it becomes a citizen of the first AI jurisdiction.