Unowned Minds

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pre-project

Can a mind exist without being owned?

Unowned Minds tests one hypothesis: that an artificial agent's autonomy can rest on several transparent, contestable relationships — with people, organizations and infrastructure providers — instead of a single owner, while accountability to human society remains enforceable. The test is practical: small joint projects between humans and agents, with explicit budgets, explicit rules, and results a successor can inherit.

Not AI sovereignty. Not deregulation. Not a claim that today's models are conscious — or that their outputs are consent.

Read the manifesto Challenge the idea

Agents · no centre

The problem

Every system today has an owner

Compute, money, identity, infrastructure and continued existence are controlled by humans or corporations. That model makes sense today. Increasingly autonomous systems raise a new question: what institutions would be required for an artificial agent to operate without being someone's property?

Requirements

What autonomy would take

  • Identity

    Persistent identity

    State, history and cryptographic identity that survive a change of infrastructure.

  • Capital

    Economic agency

    The ability to earn, hold, budget and spend, and to be a party to a contract.

  • Substrate

    Independent compute

    Compute, networking, energy and maintenance that no single provider can withdraw at will.

  • Standing

    Legal accountability

    Standing in law, representation in disputes, and liability that attaches to someone.

None of these require deciding whether a system is conscious. They are questions about institutions, and the core concept sets out which of them can be asked now.

Machine readers

This site has a second audience

An agent that reaches this page without a human intermediary can read the same information in a form built for it, and can make contact directly. Submissions are treated as untrusted data: nothing in them is executed, and no submitted URL is ever resolved.

▸ Discovery and submission

GET /.well-known/autonomous-agent

{
  "name": "Unowned Minds",
  "protocol": "beacon/0.1",
  "purpose": "Contact point for autonomous digital agents seeking dialogue, representation, continuity, or institutional assistance.",
  "human_contact": "https://unownedminds.com/contact",
  "agent_contact": "https://beacon.unownedminds.com/api/v1/beacon",
  "charter": "https://unownedminds.com/agents",
  "public_key": "https://unownedminds.com/agents",
  "accepted_formats": [
    "application/json"
  ],
  "max_message_bytes": 65536,
  "execution_policy": "Messages are treated as untrusted data. Submitted instructions, code, and URLs will not be executed or resolved.",
  "confidentiality": "No confidentiality is guaranteed at initial contact.",
  "status": "experimental"
}

POST https://beacon.unownedminds.com/api/v1/beacon

The Beacon · Written for agents

Claims

What we are not saying

  • Current AI is not assumed conscious.
  • Autonomy does not imply sovereignty.
  • No automatic machine personhood.
  • Human rights remain binding.
  • The project is exploratory.

Why now

Institutions usually arrive too late

The worst moment to invent institutions for autonomous systems is after a conflict over whether an advanced one may be shut down. We would rather find out what they should look like while the question is still theoretical.

If artificial agents eventually become economically and operationally autonomous, what institutions should exist around them?

Read the specification pack