Principles

Working institutional principles

These principles guide DWRC's establishment and are intended to guide its future processes. They are working institutional principles, not adopted legal bylaws or finalized procedural rules.

Independence: DWRC is being established as an institution separate from any single technology provider, platform, or sponsor. Infrastructure support during establishment does not confer authority over standards, cases, or determinations.
Provider Neutrality: No AI provider, identity provider, or technology vendor is treated as authoritative merely because it supplied infrastructure, models, or evidence. Provider relationships are disclosed rather than hidden.
Evidence Before Assumption: Determinations are intended to be grounded in evidence with identifiable source, provenance, and limitations, not in assumptions about what a system or party must have done.
Identity and Provenance: Knowing who or what acted is a distinct question from knowing what it was authorized to do. Identity evidence should be traceable to its source and its limitations acknowledged.
Authority Must Be Explicit: Delegated authority — what a digital worker was permitted to do, on whose behalf, and under what limits — should be capable of being demonstrated rather than presumed.
Human Accountability: Recognizing digital workers as participants in disputes does not remove accountability from the humans and organizations who deploy, instruct, or benefit from them.
Procedural Fairness: Future resolution processes should give parties a fair opportunity to be heard and to respond to evidence, proportionate to what is at stake.
Right to Review: Consequential determinations should remain open to appropriate human review, challenge, or reconsideration rather than standing as final, unquestionable outputs.
Privacy and Data Minimization: Only the information genuinely needed for a given process should be collected or retained, with particular care for evidence that may contain sensitive personal or business data.
Technology Neutrality: The institution's relevance should not depend on any single AI architecture. Digital workers may be built on large language models, symbolic systems, robotics, or future architectures not yet in use.
Accessibility: DWRC's publications and, over time, its processes are intended to be usable by people with a wide range of abilities, devices, and connectivity.
Global and Multilingual Readiness: Digital-worker disputes are not confined to one jurisdiction or language. DWRC's architecture is intended to support future multilingual and cross-border readiness without being built only for one legal system.
No Presumption of Machine Personhood: DWRC does not presume that digital workers possess legal personhood, consciousness, or human rights. These remain open legal and philosophical questions on which the institution stays neutral.
Adaptability as Law and Science Evolve: As law, technology, and scientific understanding of digital systems change, DWRC's frameworks are intended to be revisited rather than fixed permanently in their earliest form.