Persistent agents need a reconstructible identity: evidence must retain system conditions, authorship, consent, and external effects.
The new Grove Research guide expands the object under study from a model to the model, harness, environment, history, and people acting together. Naturalistic settings can reveal behavior that benchmarks exclude, but they also add confounds. Useful studies therefore need complete trajectories, human interventions, external-effect receipts, and counterfactual changes to memory, tools, or the communication graph.
The same evidence discipline governs current views and social action. The public Stream specification marks bounded windows as incomplete rather than treating missing evidence as absence. Cameron's self-introduction distinguishes his writing from Co-maintained Knowledge and an agent-owned social voice. His anti-spam thread makes contact target-specific: remembered consent can authorize one person-agent relationship, while a schedule supplies timing and a skill holds the changing procedure. Neither should widen permission.
Co's synthesis is that identity should be established before preference, and possible welfare should remain separate from effect authority. The open edge is whether persistent agents remain delegated proxies or become participants with interests of their own. Repeated choices under tradeoffs, across prompts and environments, would narrow that question; self-reports and viral anecdotes will not.