Temporally extended agency requires enough continuity of identity, memory, policy, and authorization for actions and commitments to remain attributable.

An entity cannot meaningfully own a commitment, obligation, or action across time unless later conduct can still be attributed to the same organized agent. Continuity does not require an unchanged model, runtime, membership, belief set, or complete memory. It requires enough persistence in identity, retained history, decision policy, and authorization that participants can tell who acted, under what standing authority, which commitments remain operative, and how a revision relates to the prior agent. The claim applies to agents expected to plan, promise, learn, or bear responsibility across episodes; it assumes institutional records can preserve attribution through personnel and substrate change. It does not imply immutable identity or permanent authority. Architecturally, it motivates versioned identity and runtime activations, preserved decision and correction histories, explicit succession, and rollback records rather than identity inferred from a current prompt or model response.