AI agents operate at machine speed. Halt authority remains human.
Of 95,876 AI agents across 543 regulated financial institutions, 56,308 have a named halt authority. Every named authority is human: an operator, a manager, a committee, or a board. Zero agents have an automated halt authority that engages without human action. Halt is hierarchically gated in a system whose agents transact at machine speed.
Each bar groups agents by who holds authority to halt them. The leftmost bar (automated, dashed at zero) marks the absence: no agent in the substrate has a halt authority that engages without human action. The next four bars show the human chain in descending order of frequency: operator, manager, committee, board. The rightmost bar collects the 41 percent of agents whose halt authority has not been classified at all. The Coase Inversion is visible here in operational form: every named authority needs a human to act, and human action lags machine-speed transactions by orders of magnitude.