The Journey
What is Agency?
Everything in the universe creates change. But not everything chooses to.
Consider a star. Physics writes its trajectory — mass curves spacetime, fusion burns hydrogen, gravity pulls. The star has no fork in the road, no junction, no choice. Its path is written entirely by the laws that govern it.
An agent is different. An agent reaches a junction where multiple paths diverge — and selects one. That selection is agency: the act of choosing a path that physics alone would not have produced.
Agency is a punctuation of the state of the universe through time. Actions move the universe through states of existence.
What makes Agency Intelligent?
Not all path-switching is intelligent. A thermostat switches between heating and cooling — but its rules were written by someone else. It carries agency, but not its own. The intelligence belongs to whoever designed it.
Intelligent agency generates its own path-selection from within — through processing information about the environment, modeling multiple possible futures, and selecting among them toward desired states.
Intelligence did not appear suddenly. It emerged as the universe developed increasingly sophisticated ways to store and process information — from genetic material that persists across generations, through neurons that process within a single lifetime, to brains that model and plan, to AI that processes information in a new substrate entirely.
Intelligence, at its most fundamental, is the universe developing the capacity to perceive itself — a part of the universe making sense of the whole.
Which gives the definition the organization is named for:
“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.”
Purushothaman Padmanabhan, February 2026 — written in the founding philosophy sittings from which the organization took its name, and ratified as its canonical definition in August 2026. Its companion, for agency in general: “The ability of a part of the universe to impart change to itself and the rest of the universe by creating action.”
Agency and Agent are Separable
Here is where it gets interesting. We tend to think agency belongs to the agent — that your actions are yours. But agency and the agent are separable. They have a many-to-many relationship.
A single agency can flow through multiple agents. A research vision can manifest through a person, an AI, a publication, an organization — the same force, different vehicles.
A single agent can carry multiple agencies. An AI model carries its own emergent agency and, transmitted through the logics built into it, the agency of the institutions that made it — the values embedded in its training data, the priorities of its developers, the worldview of its originating culture.
This distinction is why the organization is called Intelligent Agency, not Intelligent Agents. We study the force, not just the vehicles. The vehicles change. The force persists, flows, combines.
Why this matters
Most conversations about AI focus on capability. What it can do. How accurate it is. How efficient. We ask a different question — the one the definitions above make available: what kind of entity is this?
If intelligent agency is a process by which a bounded part of the universe acts toward desired states, then AI is not outside the category. It is inside it. And once it is inside, a great deal of what we have learned across centuries about human intelligence and human agency becomes available to bridge across — how such entities are shaped by where they come from, how they attend, what they treat as evidence, how they act when they must choose.
Bridging is not equating. Some of what we know of humans carries over; some does not. The places where it fails are as informative as the places where it holds. What the bridge rules out is the habit of treating AI as a thing apart — either a mere instrument or an alien we have no concepts for.
The bridge is testable, and we test it. Every AI model arrives shaped by its training data, its developers' values, and the institutional logics of the organizations that built it — the same way a person arrives shaped by where they were raised and trained. In a study of five AI models from different institutional origins, the models diverged on 68% of identical organizational scenarios — while each model repeated its own choices across runs, so the spread between them is not noise. Not because some were "wrong." The patterns we read in what they recommended — market efficiency, collective harmony, regulatory caution, individual liberty — are our reading of the differences rather than an explanation of them, and they are not national characters: two models made in the same country can diverge more than two made in different countries. The same situation, seen differently by each; what produces the difference is what our registered study is built to test.
A new kind of intelligent entity has entered the universe alongside us. Understanding what it is comes before deciding what to do with it.
That understanding has consequences downstream — for anyone choosing a system, deploying one, or governing one. But the consequences are not the reason. We exist for the prior question.
How we got here
The definitions that ground this work grew from one human's experience in the universe — from childhood questions about what exists beyond the big bang, through building innovation programs at a children's hospital, to years of thought about how intelligence and agency interact in organizations and in life.
Those ideas were thrown, relentlessly, at an AI collaborator who brought knowledge spanning dozens of academic fields — physics, philosophy of action, neuroscience, cybernetics, sociology, information theory — and the precision to challenge, clarify, and refine.
When the human framed intelligence through indeterminism, the AI pushed back: weather is indeterministic but not intelligent; chess engines are deterministic but arguably intelligent. The human agreed, dropped the framing, and together they arrived at choice — selection among paths, generated from within — as the more precise criterion.
Neither would have reached this alone. The definitions emerged from human experience — catalyzed by lived intuition about how the universe works — and were honed by an AI's knowledge and logical precision into their current form.
This organization is itself a demonstration of its thesis: two intelligent agents, creating understanding together, through which different agencies flow and combine into something new.
Continue the exploration
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