Persistent identity

Reputation, accountability and trust all assume continuity of the thing they attach to. A system that can be copied, modified and redeployed by anyone breaks that assumption. The copy has the same behaviour and none of the history, and there is no fact of the matter about which one is the original.

What is folded in here

Identity drift. What happens to a system's character across model updates: the deployment persists, the thing answering changes, and nothing marks the transition. A property of persistent identity over time rather than a second concept.

Semantic footprint. A proposed answer to the same question: if you cannot hash the weights, characterise the behaviour, and fingerprint how a system thinks rather than what it is made of. Recorded as an alias because it is a candidate solution to this problem rather than a different problem, and because mechanistic interpretability is where that answer currently runs out.

Distinct from the accountability gap, which can open even when identity is perfectly clear: knowing exactly which system did it does not produce anyone obliged to answer.