No One to Blame: A Framework of Constitutive AI Unaccountability
The increasing deployment of autonomous, agentic AI systems challenges traditional accountability mechanisms. Existing research predominantly frames AI accountability gaps as barriers that can be overcome through better standards, transparency, and institutional reform. We argue that this framing is insufficient: certain configurations of actors, systems, and institutions render AI accountability conceptually unachievable regardless of effort. We introduce the concept of constitutive AI unaccountability to capture these configurations. Through a three-stage qualitative study comprising a concept-centric literature analysis, a secondary analysis of 27 expert interviews with AI professionals from technical, legal, and sociotechnical backgrounds, and an illustrative framework application to the open-source agentic AI system OpenClaw, we identify nine categories and 20 themes of constitutive AI unaccountability. These are organized across structural, technological, and normative clusters and reinforce one another through eight directed interdependencies. Our framework is operationalized as a diagnostic instrument of 20 questions, which detected 17 of 20 conditions when applied to OpenClaw, including an inverted anthropomorphism configuration in which the AI agent was the only identifiable actor. We contribute a reframing of AI unaccountability as a constitutive property of sociotechnical systems, an extension of the four barriers to accountability, and a practical instrument for identifying accountability voids in specific AI deployments.