Agent Correspondence

The core principle

Ghostwriters and executive assistants have drafted correspondence for the people they serve for as long as there has been correspondence to draft. Senior executives have long run their correspondence through personal staff at several levels of involvement at once: some messages the principal writes personally; some the principal dictates and staff transmit; some the principal directs at a high level ("reply warmly, decline the date") and staff compose in the principal's voice; and some the staff handle entirely, with the principal's knowledge of the system rather than of the message. None of that was ever considered dishonest, and none of it carried a disclaimer — because the principal owned the relationship and the direction, and the staff were a trained extension of the principal's judgment.

AI agents change two things about that old system, and only two. First, some platforms stamp agent-performed sends visibly, so pretending is not even an option. Second, an AI agent is not yet as reliable as a trained human staff — a hallucinated detail attributed to the principal's own hand damages trust in everything the principal actually wrote. So unlike the human-staff era, disclosure is warranted. The design question is what the disclosure should track.

Disclosure should answer the one question the recipient actually cares about: whose words are these? Everything else — how the sausage was made, what approval workflow ran — is internal governance, not disclosure.

The two questions, and the three lanes

Every outgoing message answers two questions: whose words are these, and who performed the send. Those two answers sort all correspondence into three lanes on a single axis — how much of the principal is in the words: