Agent of Record: When AI Acts in Your Name, Who Pays?

Your software just made a decision in your name.A pricing algorithm overcharges a family. A chatbot promises what your company never agreed to deliver. A coverage system denies a ninety-one-year-old man's care. A trading engine loses $440 million in forty-five minutes. None of these are future scenarios. They have already happened — and every time, the same question comes back: who, exactly, is responsible?The agentic decade has been missing one piece. This book is its name.The Custody ChainIn Agent of Record, entrepreneur, operator, and author of the Intelligent Ownership Trilogy Ross D. Blankenship names the architecture every AI decision already runs through — and hands operators and citizens the language, the framework, and the working tools to survive an economy where machines now act in our names.Every agentic decision passes through five links of custody. Every breakdown can be traced to exactly one:The Trainer — who built the model.The Deployer — who put it in the field.The Prompter — who instructed it.The Authorizer — who granted it permission.The Subject — who bears the consequences.Inside, you'll learn:How to close The Accountability Gap — the space between what your AI did and who answers for itThe Custody Chain applied across nine high-stakes verticals: money, medicine, law, real estate, government, commerce, identity, and moreOn-the-record interviews with practitioners running live AI deployments at major banks, hospitals, government agencies, and law firmsThe Operator's Doctrine and the Citizen's Doctrine — what to do before you authorize an agent, and what to do when you become the SubjectThe Playbook — a working framework for assigning responsibility before the machine acts, not afterDrawing on real cases — and on the author's own pricing agent, “JT,” which priced a spot he never directly authorized at a Colorado airport in February 2026 — Agent of Record trades prophecy for something useful: a chain, a doctrine, and a next move.When AI acts in your name, who pays?From the author of the Intelligent Ownership Trilogy — Automate, Launch, Retire; Dirt, Data and Decisions; and The Intelligent Property. Read more