Agents Don't Need a Better Brain -- They Need a World: Toward a Digital Citizenship Protocol for Autonomous AI Systems

Work on AI safety and alignment has largely focused on improving the behavior of individual models. That emphasis is necessary, but it is incomplete for the governance of autonomous agents operating across open, multi-agent, and institutionally significant environments. This paper advances the complementary thesis that many important risks in such environments are infrastructural rather than purely model-internal. We present the Digital Citizenship Protocol for AI (DCP-AI), a layered governance architecture that combines cryptographically verifiable identity, machine-readable intent declaration, tamper-evident audit trails, authenticated agent-to-agent communication, lifecycle governance, procedural accountability, and delegated representation into a unified protocol stack. We map the framework to documented categories of autonomous-agent failure and situate it relative to emerging regulatory and standards-oriented efforts. 16 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, 1 appendix. Open-source protocol: https://dcp-ai.org