Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2026

Abstract

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems exhibit fluid agency in multi-step workflows: lacking human-like consciousness or culpability, yet they display behavior that is (i) stochastic (probabilistic and path‑dependent), (ii) dynamic (co‑evolving with user interaction), and (iii) adaptive (able to reorient across contexts). These properties generate valuable outputs but collapse attribution, irreducibly entangling human and machine inputs. Doctrines that assume traceable provenance—authorship, inventorship, and liability—fracture under this unmappability, yielding ownership gaps and moral “crumple zones.”This Article argues that only functional equivalence stabilizes doctrine under unmappability: Where provenance is indeterminate, legal frameworks should treat human and AI contributions as equivalent for allocating rights and responsibility—not as a claim of moral or economic parity but as a pragmatic default. We show that this principle stabilizes doctrine across domains, offering administrable rules: in copyright, vesting ownership in human orchestrators without parsing inseparable contributions; in patent, tying inventor-of-record status to human orchestration and reduction to practice, even when AI supplies the pivotal insight; and in tort, replacing intractable causation inquiries with enterprise-level and sector-specific strict or no-fault schemes. The contribution is both descriptive and normative: fluid agency explains why origin-based tests fail, while functional equivalence supplies an outcome-focused framework to allocate rights and responsibility when attribution collapses.

Keywords

Artificial Intelligence, Agency, Authorship, Copyright, Inventorship, Patent, Liability, Tort

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Intellectual Property Law | Marketing

Research Areas

Marketing

Publication

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Volume

21

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

32

ISSN

2157-2534

Publisher

University of Washington

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wjlta/vol21/iss1/3/

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