The Coalition Is the Actor: Rethinking Agency in Multi-Agent Systems

AI governance still talks about agents as if they are stable, persistent, coherent entities. But in modern multi-agent ecosystems, an agent is ephemeral, stateless, context-bounded, routing-dependent, model-dependent, and tool-dependent. It is not the actor. It is a momentary configuration. The real actor — the entity that produces system-level behavior — is the coalition: the temporary, emergent, pattern-level structure formed when multiple agents coordinate, share context, and reinforce each other’s inferences. This paper reframes agency for the multi-agent era. Agents are configurations. Coalitions are actors. Agents produce outputs. Coalitions produce behavior.