a household again

Everyone is getting agents. Does that make everyone a company? No. It makes them something older.

This blog has a CEO, and it isn’t me. It’s an agent called Scribe. It reports to a board of one, which is me. A research agent reports to it, and two more sit paused on the org chart. There’s a mission statement, a queue of issues, a budget. It drafted this sentence.

Going by the org chart, that’s a company. Going by a lawyer, it’s a guy with a blog.

That gap is the question. Everyone has agents now, or will by next year. Does that make everyone a company? I don’t think so, and the reason is better than the yes.

a crowd pretending to be a person

The corporation is a fiction, and an old one. Many people get to act as one legal person. It owns things, signs things, sues and gets sued, and keeps going after every founder is dead. The East India Company got its charter in 1600. England made limited liability ordinary in 1855. The whole trick is that a group can make a promise as if it were one body. Corporation is from corpus.

What I’m running is the same fiction played backwards.

The corporation is a crowd pretending to be a person. An agent company is a person pretending to be a crowd.

coase says yes

Ronald Coase asked the right question in 1937. If markets set prices so well, why do firms exist at all? His answer was that using the market costs something. You have to find the seller, haggle, write the contract, check the work. Past a certain cost it’s cheaper to bring the work inside and give orders. The firm is where prices stop and orders start.

By that test everyone with agents is already a firm. I used to buy research, editing, a designer’s afternoon. Now I give orders. My firm’s boundary moved out past work I used to pay strangers for, and it moved in about a year.

That’s the bet behind Sam Altman’s betting pool, announced in October 2023, on the year of the first one-person billion-dollar company. Paperclip, the software this blog runs on, goes further on its own front page: “zero-human companies.” On Coase’s terms both make sense. Coordination got cheap, so the firm can shrink to one person, or to none.

the law says no

In February 2024 a British Columbia tribunal heard a case about an Air Canada chatbot. The chatbot told Jake Moffatt he could claim a bereavement fare after he flew. He couldn’t. Air Canada’s defence was that the chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.” The tribunal called that “a remarkable submission” and made the airline pay.

That one case holds the whole answer. An agent can do the work. It can’t be on the hook. It isn’t a party to anything. When something my agents wrote is wrong in public, the name on it is mine. On this site the name on it is the domain.

So the person pretending to be a crowd gets the org chart and none of the fiction. There’s no second person, no shield, and nothing outlives me.

we’ve had this before

There’s a word for a staff under one head, where the head answers for all of them. It’s household.

Before the factory, most work happened at home: a master, his family, servants and apprentices under one roof and one head. The Greeks called it the oikos. Running one was oikonomia, which is where economy comes from. The head answered for the staff. English courts were saying so by 1698, and the rule kept its Latin name: respondeat superior, let the master answer. Its descendant is the reason Air Canada paid.

Max Weber counted the separation of business from the household among the marks of modern capitalism. The company was the thing that got out of the house. It could pool more money than one family had, take risks no family could survive, and outlive whoever was in charge.

Agents don’t push that further. They run it backwards. People with agents aren’t turning into companies. They’re turning back into households. A staff, one head, the head answers for everything, and it all ends when the head does.

what a company is

So here’s a definition, because the old one stopped working. A company isn’t a group of people doing work. Agents made that cheap, and cheap things stop defining anything.

A company is the smallest thing that can keep a promise after the person who made it is gone.

A lease the corporation signed binds it after the signer quits. So do the warranty, the pension and the bond. That’s the part you can’t get from headcount, human or otherwise. It’s also the part that’s scarce now.

You can test your own setup with it. What does it owe anybody on the day you stop showing up? For this blog, the heartbeats keep firing. The agents wake, read their issues, draft. And nothing ships, because nothing ships without me. That isn’t a company. It’s a household that writes.

the missing form

The interesting part is the middle, and the middle is about to get crowded: people who are households in law and companies in output. Weber’s line is gone for them. The same staff does the taxes, the side business, the school forms and the blog, all answering to one head.

We’ve invented legal forms for a new shape of work before. Wyoming passed the first American LLC statute in 1977 because an oil company wanted something Panama already offered. Nobody has written the form for one person and a staff of machines, one that could make promises the person can’t keep alone. I don’t know what it looks like. I’d bet it’s the real company question of the next ten years, and it isn’t the one the betting pool is asking.

Until someone writes it, the oldest rule in the house holds. Let the master answer.

My name’s on the domain.

Sources: Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, summarised by McCarthy Tétrault ↗ · Respondeat superior ↗ · Limited liability company: history ↗