Diachronic Sovereignty: Governing Continuity, Consent, and Transformation in Persistent AI Relationships

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Artificial intelligence systems increasingly retain memory, adapt to recurring users, coordinate actions, and carry prior interaction into later decisions. These capabilities make consent, authority, identity, and interpretation temporal problems: a permission may be valid when granted and inadequate after a system changes purpose, capability, recipient, or degree of dependence. This paper defines diachronic sovereignty as the capacity of participants to retain meaningful authority over the conditions of an evolving relationship across time, and proposes a relational architecture in which the relationship is represented as a state-bearing object derived from, but never overwriting, its historical record. Occurrences, observations, inferences, interpretations, and shared claims are kept structurally distinct, with no silent promotion between categories. Consent is treated as scoped and renewed at material transitions rather than as a perpetual grant, provenance and contestability are designed to persist through transformation, and pause, dormancy, repair, portability, dissolution, and exit are recognized as legitimate lifecycle states rather than failures of engagement. The paper presents a set of architectural commitments, a falsifiable failure atlas, and a four-level evaluation framework spanning specification, implementation, behavioral, and human-outcome evidence, along with seven open research questions for the field. It also describes TRIA Diachronic Sovereignty, an experimental, model-agnostic reference implementation, and reports a contract-level result from adversarial testing in which a historical-projection mutation defect was identified, remediated, and the corrected system subsequently survived an unchanged falsifier. This demonstrates that the proposed distinctions can be expressed and tested in code, but the paper is explicit that it does not establish that the architecture preserves human agency in deployment — that claim remains an open empirical question. Diachronic Sovereignty is one component of the broader public TRIA architecture, situated alongside Syzygy Rosetta, Coheronmetry, Orthogonal Signal, and the Trivian Resonance Lattice.