Distributing Accountability, Not Capability: Phase Separation and the LLM Workflow Quadrant in Autonomous AI Agent Architectures

Autonomous AI agents in business deployments exhibit a recurring failure mode: when an incident occurs, responsibility cannot be redirected to a separable contributor. The dominant discourse treats this as a single phenomenon, addressed by sandboxing, human-in-the-loop overload, or what Elish (2019) named the moral crumple zone. This paper argues the phenomenon is two architecturally distinct failure modes that have been conflated, and that the conflation is sustained by a missing positive name and a missing time-axis. The paper introduces two contributions. First, a four-quadrant decomposition of business AI work — along the axes of deterministic vs semantic-judgment and pre-defined vs exploratory — yields a…