Agent of Record
An Agent of Record is the named, insurable party bound to every autonomous action — the responsible human or entity on file when an AI agent acts on someone's behalf in the real world. It guarantees that accountability stays with a real party rather than dissolving into “the software did it.”
The phrase is borrowed deliberately. In insurance and real estate, the agent of record is the designated representative on file for a policy or a property — the one party with standing and responsibility. In my book Agent of Record, I apply that same structure to autonomous AI: as agents move from answering to acting — booking, buying, negotiating, operating — someone has to remain on the record for what they do.
It is the organizing idea behind the trust layer autonomy needs. An agent has no assets, license, or insurance; it cannot be the accountable party. The Agent of Record names who is, and ties that party to the agent through bounded authority, signed evidence, and a Human Review Rule for high-stakes actions.
An autonomous fleet operator runs agents that reserve charging slots, dispatch vehicles, and settle payments across providers. For this deployment, a specific operating entity is the Agent of Record: it is named in contracts, it carries insurance for the agents' actions, and every consequential action the agents take is signed and logged against its authority.
When a scheduling conflict strands a vehicle and triggers a dispute, there is no ambiguity about who answers. The operator produces the tamper-evident trail showing exactly which authorization the agent relied on, the matter is resolved against a known responsible party, and the insurer pays under a policy written precisely because accountability was assignable. That assignability — not the model's cleverness — is what lets the agents operate at scale.