Intelligent Agency
An organization exploring how intelligent agency interacts with the universe it emerged within.
Intelligent Agency exists to theorize artificial intelligence as one more entity in this universe capable of being intelligently agentic — not as a tool, not as an exception, but as an entity to be understood on the same terms we use for the others. Humans, animals, and AI belong in one bucket before they belong in separate ones.
The method follows from that. Where knowledge we already hold about human intelligence and human agency applies, we bridge it across; where it does not, we say so and look for what does. The work abstracts upward until both humans and AI can be seen as intelligent entities, then asks what actually differs.
Our current research is one expression of that project. Every AI system is made somewhere, by someone, under some set of institutional conditions — and it carries those conditions with it into every setting that adopts it. We study that carriage: how AI systems acquire the worldviews of the institutions that produce them, and what they transmit into the worlds they enter.
The organization practices what it studies. Our research is produced in deliberate partnership between a human researcher and AI — with the collaboration itself disclosed as method, and our analytical tools chosen so that no single producer's worldview judges the evidence alone.
“Intelligent agency — a process by which a bounded part of the universe interacts (or manipulates) with the universe (including self) towards desired (or directed) future states.”
“The ability of a part of the universe to impart change to itself and the rest of the universe by creating action.”
Both definitions were authored by Purushothaman Padmanabhan in February 2026, during the organization's founding philosophy sittings, and ratified as the organization's canonical definitions in August 2026. The reasoning behind them — why choice, and not unpredictability, marks the boundary, and why agency and agent come apart — is set out in The Journey.
- Oct 2026 4S 2026 talk, Toronto — “What AI Agents Carry into the Loop: Network Positions of Production and the Reconfiguration of Epistemic Cultures,” accepted for the Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting; a 20-minute panel talk on October 7. See Publications.
- May 2026 Working paper posted to SSRN — “The Institutional Origins of AI: Evidence from Large Language Models” (6749643). See Research.
- Mar 28, 2026 Paper accepted at AOM 2026 — “Nonhuman Attentional Control: Organizational Import of External Institutional Logics,” OMT Division, Academy of Management Annual Meeting. Presented as a pre-recorded talk, Session 22935. Watch the talk.