Beyond the Platform: Immutable Portability and the Governance of Persistent Personal AI Profiles

Abstract

Persistent AI memory is transforming artificial intelligence from a session-bound tool into an increasingly individualized relationship. Existing portability regimes allow users to retrieve certain records, but they do not yet govern the broader, evolving body of context, preferences, inferences, relationships, instructions, and provenance that enables continuity across time. This article defines that governance object as the Persistent Personal AI Profile (PPAIP) and proposes Immutable Portability as a governing principle. Immutable Portability combines two propositions: an enduring, non-revocable right and practical capability to retrieve, retain, and transfer a PPAIP in functionally usable form, and a restriction on post-termination beneficial exploitation by a former provider absent a separate legitimate basis. The article situates this proposal against existing European and U.S. portability and AI-governance frameworks, current platform export practices, and emerging work on portable AI memory and personal AI sovereignty. It further argues that effective governance will require interoperable standards, supervision, revision authority, and accountability, while also confronting lifecycle questions involving dormancy, incapacity, death, succession, destruction, and possible economic transfer. These issues warrant anticipatory attention from cybersecurity leaders, policymakers, standards bodies, legal scholars, and technology providers before proprietary dependence becomes structurally entrenched.