Tracing Estonia's AI-agent digital identity reform: rival explanations and observables (test protocol v0.2)

A dated test protocol, not a pre-registration, for a study of Estonia's policy on identifiers for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The study traces the move from an agent identifier discussed in June 2026 as an isikukood (the Estonian personal identification code) to a design that keeps the agent from being a person, and the draft act that the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications (MKM) sent for inter-ministerial coordination on 08.10.2026 (draft legislation information system, EIS, file 26-1105). It uses explaining-outcome process tracing on its theory-first path. The protocol sets out the rival explanations, the observables that bear on them and how each is tested, the coding design with a human second coder, the collection rules, and the author's interventions in the process, each with its date. Section 4.3, the predictions for the coordination round and later stages, was fixed on 15.10.2026 and is deposited byte for byte as a separate file, protocol-v0.2-section-4.3-2026-10-15.md, with SHA-256 726307909775b7200ce7c27534aab8503b9633fef89b95918db0f579d7dccbc2. It entered our private repository in commit f20be16ef on 15.10.2026 at 07:46:50 UTC. Its hash was published in note 8(e) of the brief of 16.10.2026 (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23337857), before the round closed on 22.10.2026. On 17.10.2026, 2 extracts fixed the lines of the protocol that say when section 4.3 closes: the cut-off (24.11.2026, 23:59 Tallinn time, or the bill's initiation if earlier), the end of wave 3, and the reading of the brief's release date. Version 1.1 of the brief (doi:10.5281/zenodo.23697816), published with this record, prints their hashes in note 8(e). The archive timestamps-2026-10-17.zip holds 2 manifests of these files, stamped on 17.10.2026 by 2 RFC 3161 time-stamping authorities (FreeTSA and DigiCert) and submitted to OpenTimestamps, with the tokens, the proofs and a README with the commands to check them. The stamps prove that the files existed by then, not when they were written. Files: the protocol (protocol-v0.2-2026-10-15.md); section 4.3; the 2 extracts; the list of the distinctive requests of the author's non-paper of 05.10.2026, written on 16.10.2026 (nonpaper-v1.0-request-list-2026-10-16.md); the timestamps archive. Every change after version 0.1 of 12.10.2026 is dated in section 8 of the protocol.