An AI agent can now prove it did exactly what it was told, logged and auditable to a standard a court would accept. That proof protects you about as well as a smoke detector during a flood. Verification was always the easy half. The hard half decides whether an acting agent can be trusted with anything that matters, and almost no one is building it.

Across the Commitment Economy series, AI has been the disrupting force. That framing is accurate but incomplete. The old economy offers AI two slots: tool of an owner, or owner itself and both fail. The Commitment Economy did not set out to solve this. It solved it as a byproduct. Custodial Intelligence is the structural position that results.