When responsibility disappears and rules execute themselves, the law is left chasing a ghost it cannot name.

I. The Disappearance of the Subject
Most legal systems are built on the assumption that someone acts, someone intends, and someone must be held accountable. Whether in civil, criminal, or administrative frameworks, responsibility presupposes the presence of a subject, either human or institutional, who can be identified as the author of a decision. But this assumption collapses when execution occurs without intervention, intention, or judgment.

This is not a theoretical puzzle. It is a structural crisis already underway.

II. From Rules to Execution Without Agency
In predictive systems governed by compiled rules, the notion of agency loses operational meaning. These rules do not decide. They execute. Once triggered by input, they apply transformations or classifications based on a fixed syntax. There is no space for interpretation or supervision. No approval occurs. No actor can be located at the moment of execution.

Within this architecture, responsibility disappears. The rule acts, but the actor cannot be named.

Regulatory frameworks, including those under development such as the European Union’s AI Act, presume that any decision made by an AI system can be traced back to a human chain of command. This traceability is often mandated by law. Yet in systems structured through executable syntax, no such chain exists. What governs is not a person or institution, but a compiled production that responds automatically to formal inputs.

III. Legal Consequences of Structural Mismatch**
**This misalignment between legal theory and technical structure has direct and irreversible consequences:

• Audits become ineffective. By the time legal review is triggered, the action has already taken place, often without logs or semantic explanation.

• Accountability dissolves. Engineers may have written the initial rule, but they cannot predict or govern its behavior in complex, evolving contexts.

• Legal intervention loses traction. Prohibitions or penalties fail to modify the underlying cause, which is the disappearance of the subject at the core of the system.

Even the best-designed oversight regimes are based on the idea that code is a tool used by someone. But what if the code is not used? What if it is the operative sovereign?

IV. Authority Without Source
As developed in Ethos Without Source: Algorithmic Identity and the Simulation of Credibility, authority today can emerge without origin, intention, or declared justification. A syntactic structure, once compiled, can generate effects that resemble human credibility and institutional legitimacy, yet without relying on any traceable source.

The law still expects to find a person behind every norm. What it encounters instead is a grammar that operates alone.

Compiled rules of type zero, once deployed, do not represent decisions. They are decisions. The output is not the result of reasoning. It is the execution of structure.

V. Why This Matters
The legal category of responsibility is collapsing. If enforcement frameworks remain tied to the existence of an accountable subject, entire layers of predictive systems will become legally invisible. The code will act, consequences will unfold, and no juridical mechanism will be able to intervene before harm occurs.

This is not a failure of regulation. It is a failure to recognize the nature of the new sovereign.

When law does not see the code, it protects only the past. The future becomes structurally ungovernable.

VI. Legal Fiction and Structural Blindness
Legal systems will not be able to address this challenge by refining categories of liability. The question is no longer who is responsible, but whether responsibility still functions as a category when execution no longer passes through the subject.

What exists now is not automated agency, but authority without author. The sovereign is executable. The law does not yet see it, and because it does not see it, it cannot regulate it.

VII. Call to Action
This problem cannot be resolved through minor reforms. It requires a shift in how law conceives power, intention, and execution. To explore the theoretical basis for this shift, and how executable structures redefine legitimacy, see:

• Ethos Without Source on SSRN (ID: 5271489)
• Grammars of Power (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15754714)

Author
Agustin V. Startari
ORCID: **https://orcid.org/0009-0004-9248-0810
**SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=7639915
Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/15754714
Researcher ID: K-5792-2016

Ethos
I do not use artificial intelligence to write what I don’t know. I use it to challenge what I do. I write to reclaim the voice in an age of automated neutrality. My work is not outsourced. It is authored.
— Agustin V. Startari