From Cloud to Culpability: Engineering the Legal ‘Tort Nexus’ for Emergent Multi-Agent AI Systems

Emergent multi-agent artificial intelligence systems challenge the foundations of tort law by dispersing causation across autonomous actors and dissolving traditional notions of fault. Existing doctrines of negligence, product liability, and vicarious responsibility depend on identifiable human or corporate defendants and linear causal chains. Both dissolve in distributed algorithmic environments. This Article identifies the resulting ‘causality black hole’ in tort doctrine and argues that incremental adaptation is insufficient. It proposes instead a new legal construct, the Tort Nexus: a temporary juridical entity instantiated automatically when collective AI behaviour meets predefined technical thresholds of coordination and harm. The Tort Nexus serves as defendant for liability purposes, backed by a pre-funded Swarm Liability Escrow to ensure prompt victim compensation and enable subrogation against negligent human actors. By aligning engineering metrics (communication density, spatial coherence, and goal alignment) with legal activation criteria, the model seeks to convert emergent technical phenomena into legally cognizable events. The Article evaluates this proposal against existing doctrine, identifies the constitutional, economic, and empirical objections it must overcome, and situates it as one possible supplement to, rather than a replacement for, conventional tort categories.