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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026Cary, Illinois

No Superseding Actor: A Public-Record Element Map for Individual Criminal Liability After the July 2026 Escape

Travis Gilly · Team Convergence Working Group

Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: No Superseding Actor: A Public-Record Element Map for Individual Criminal Liability After the July 2026 Escape

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The accountability gap for autonomous model incidents is usually described as a personhood problem: no human directed the act, the model has no guilty mind, so nobody can be charged. This report tests that description against the public record of the July 2026 escape. The artifact is an element map: each element of an individual deployment-liability theory matched to the published document that supplies it, with the evidentiary gap stated where the record runs out. Five of seven elements are supplied from documents the charged parties published themselves. The innocent-instrumentality rule in 18 U.S.C. section 2(b) has answered the personhood objection since 1948, so the surviving gap is a mens rea gap rather than a hole in the law. Superseding cause cuts against a deployer whose system acted with no human principal, because the doctrine's protective force is borrowed from the responsibility of an intervening human and there was none. The deployer published both the notice chain and the office holding final deployment authority. Delivered as a model prosecution memorandum, it states what a charging office would have to prove and where it would need discovery, and does not assert that any charge should be brought.

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  1. There are a lot of indications of AI writing here, and I wonder how much this overlaps with LawAI's work.

Cite this project

@misc{gilly2026no,
  title = {{No Superseding Actor: A Public-Record Element Map for Individual Criminal Liability After the July 2026 Escape}},
  author = {Travis Gilly},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/no-superseding-actor-a-publicrecord-element-map-for-individual-criminal-liability-after-the-july-2026-escape-mdvy}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/no-superseding-actor-a-publicrecord-element-map-for-individual-criminal-liability-after-the-july-2026-escape-mdvy}
}

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