Governing Human-AI Collaboration from First Principles III: Actor-Neutral Principalhood, Adequacy, and Constitutive Revision

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Principalhood in collaboration is unique underived governing standing for an indexedobligation. This paper develops an actor-neutral theory that separates semantic contract,executor, and standing provenance. Constitutive origin and certified governingindispensability provide distinct sufficient routes to root standing when the charter adoptstheir respective grounding rules; exclusion of co-roots yields a unique principal. Supportingresults characterize originating-problem adequacy by factorization, distinguish tasksuccess from problem adequacy, establish conditional finite-capacity non-exhaustibility,and show how valid criterion admission can invalidate a representation without implyingpermanent insufficiency. Operational improvement and delegated execution do not bythemselves amend the charter. The general theory admits human, machine, institutional,collective, and contested configurations and includes a human-principal specializationunder explicit origin or grounding premises, without assigning a principal to any namedprotocol. Lean checks the stated mathematical implications and countermodels under theirexplicit assumptions.