RL-INST Institutions / regulation

Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment · Iason Gabriel · 2020

“On the one hand, negative rights are widely endorsed but have limited scope. They rule out a certain class of actions but do not provide guidance in all situations [...] On the other hand, positive rights address this limitation, providing designers with a richer set of goals and aspirations, but command significantly less global support in practice.”

why coded: Human-rights alignment pushes responsibility to institutional/legal scaffolding · unit #18, pp. 426

“Jobin et al. (2019) observe that beneath the surface there continues to be 'substantive divergence in relation to how these principles are interpreted, why they are deemed important, what issues, domains or actors they pertain to, and how they should be implemented' (389). [...] Mittlestadt (2019a, 5) notes that existing codes largely contain 'abstract and vague concepts [...] which are not specific enough to be action-guiding' [...] 'we must therefore hesitate to celebrate consensus around high-level principles that hide deep political and normative disagreement'.”

why coded: Convergence claims about governance codes - institutionally located · unit #19, pp. 427

“democratic processes have the potential to confer legitimacy on decisions about AI alignment; they can move us beyond the notion that certain principles are justified, and show, additionally, that they have been actively endorsed. This makes the principles binding in a way they would not otherwise be the case (Simmons 1999).”

why coded: Legitimacy via democratic endorsement for society-scale systems · unit #23, pp. 430

Toward a Theory of Justice for Artificial Intelligence (Daedalus 151(2):218-231) · Iason Gabriel · 2022

“[The demand for justice] reframes much of the discussion around 'AI ethics' by drawing attention to the fact that the moral properties of algorithms are not internal to the models themselves but rather a product of the social systems within which they are deployed.”

why coded: Moral properties located in deployment systems, not models - the sociological turn stated crisply · unit #1, pp. 218

“The first [claim] is that the basic structure of society is best understood as a composite of sociotechnical systems: that is, systems that are constituted through the interaction of human and technological elements. [...] The second is that AI increasingly shapes elements of the basic structure in relevant ways, and hence that its design, development, and deployment all potentially interface with principles of justice in this context.”

why coded: Basic structure as sociotechnical composite - AI inside justice's jurisdiction · unit #2, pp. 219

CERN for AI: a theoretical framework for autonomous simulation-based artificial intellige… · Ljubiša Bojić; Matteo Cinelli; Dubravko Ćulibrk; … · 2024

“[Proposal for] a theoretical framework for autonomous simulation-based artificial intelligence testing and alignment [- an international CERN-like facility evaluating AI in complex simulated social environments before deployment].”

why coded: CERN-scale international testing/certification institution - the big-institution governance option · unit #1, pp. 1

Legal and administrative frameworks as foundations for AI alignment with human volition · Saša Josifović · 2024

“It advocates for a legal-centric approach over a moral one, suggesting that in the event of AGI emergence, AI systems should be capable of self-regulation, informed by human law and jurisprudence. [...] focusing on legal frameworks as historically grown manifestations of coherent human volition.”

why coded: Legal-centric alignment: law and jurisprudence as the target, not morality · unit #1, pp. 3057

Beyond Preferences in AI Alignment · Tan Zhi-Xuan; Micah Carroll; Matija Franklin; Hal… · 2024

“if we take fair and impartially negotiated standards as the target of AI alignment, then technical advances will not be enough; we also need to foster the development of social, economic, and political orders that provide the conditions for free and fair agreement. [...] After all, if we are going to align AI systems with normative standards we would collectively endorse, then we had better make sure that a 'we' exists to endorse them.”

why coded: Social/political preconditions: institutions that make a negotiating 'we' exist · unit #17, pp. 1849

Helpful, harmless, honest? Sociotechnical limits of AI alignment and safety through Reinf… · Adam Dahlgren Lindström; Leila Methnani; Lea Krau… · 2025

“[We suggest] the establishment of AI safety as a sociotechnical discipline that is open to the normative and political dimensions of artificial intelligence. [...] technical design interventions are just one among the many needed efforts to build safer and ethically responsible AI systems.”

why coded: Safety as sociotechnical discipline across institutions/processes/technology · unit #6, pp. 11

Full-Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value · Joe Edelman; Tan Zhi-Xuan; Ryan Lowe; Oliver Klin… · 2025

“Beneficial societal outcomes cannot be guaranteed by aligning individual AI systems with the intentions of their operators or users. Even an AI system that is perfectly aligned to the intentions of its operating organization can lead to bad outcomes if the goals of that organization are misaligned with those of other institutions and individuals. For this reason, we need full-stack alignment, the concurrent alignment of AI systems and the institutions that shape them with what people value.”

why coded: Full-stack thesis: institutions must be co-aligned, not just systems - the institutional turn consolidated · unit #1, pp. 1

A matter of principle? AI alignment as the fair treatment of claims · Iason Gabriel; Geoff Keeling · 2025

“Our view is that legal compliance at best represents a minimum standard for AI alignment. [...] legislation often lags behind technological innovation [...] there are many occasions when ethical direction is needed in relation to the design and development of AI systems, but where legal instruction on such matters (backed by the threat of punishment) would be inappropriate.”

why coded: Legal compliance as minimum standard only; law lags and overreaches · unit #13, pp. 1966

Misalignment or misuse? The AGI alignment tradeoff · Max Hellrigel-Holderbaum; Leonard Dung · 2025

“If AGI is aligned with its designers, then its designers gain massive power and can use it to, e.g., subjugate all other humans. [...] We must also consider that designers may be controlled e.g. by malevolent governments, corporations or dictators.”

why coded: The institutional capture pathway · unit #9, pp. 15

“A common categorization of risks into misuse and accident risks (where accident risks include misalignment) neglects structural risks. [...] some risks do not fit squarely on either side of the accident-misuse-dichotomy.”

why coded: Structural risks escape the misuse/accident dichotomy - institutional register · unit #13, pp. 18

“Other governance proposals, such as mandatory risk assessments before AI deployment by third parties with comprehensive access, clarifying liability for AI harms, compulsory reporting of safety cases, and know-your-customer requirements, may be further uniform improvements [reducing both takeover and misuse risk].”

why coded: Liability clarification + third-party assessment as uniform improvements - governance as the resolution · unit #14, pp. 19

AI Alignment: A Comprehensive Survey · Jiaming Ji; Tianyi Qiu; Boyuan Chen; Borong Zhang… · 2025

“[Concluding section: 'Rethinking AI Alignment from a Socio-technical Perspective' - governance, multi-stakeholder approaches, and open-source policy as integral to the alignment cycle, with European policymakers requiring 'performance, predictability, interpretability, corrigibility, security' across the lifecycle.]”

why coded: The technical survey's own socio-technical turn - governance internal to the alignment cycle · unit #3, pp. 58

Moral disagreement and the limits of AI value alignment: a dual challenge of epistemic ju… · Nick Schuster; Daniel Kilov · 2025

“The problem AI introduces here is that the risk pedestrians face would become less random and more systemic—that is, embedded in the transportation system rather than incidental to it—as self-driving cars become increasingly prevalent on public roads. In the same way, AI systems for military, medical, criminal justice, financial, and many other applications stand to systemically favor some groups over others where people would otherwise be subject to more random outcomes.”

why coded: Randomness-to-system: AI embeds risk distribution into institutions · unit #4, pp. 6074

“When AI operates at a scale that amounts to a form of governance, it becomes subject to norms of governance. In addition to being 'safe' in the narrow sense of 'technically robust,' then, systemically impactful AI must also satisfy standards of public justification and legitimacy (Gabriel & Ghazavi 2022). To the extent that it fails to do so, it poses an authoritarian threat.”

why coded: Governance framing of systemic AI · unit #5, pp. 6075

“We submit that such decisions are acceptable insofar as (1) they are subject to indirect democratic oversight, and (2) the decision-makers are able to provide reasonable justifications for them, which can in turn enable effective contestation and recourse. [...] Only when combined, then, do these weaker criteria plausibly explain why people have good reason to accept the controversial decisions of unelected arbiters who do not have any special claim to moral expertise.”

why coded: Bureaucratic-administrative model as the institutional template · unit #16, pp. 6084

Roadmap on Incentive Compatibility for AI Alignment and Governance in Sociotechnical Syst… · Zhaowei Zhang; Fengshuo Bai; Mingzhi Wang; Haoyan… · 2025

“existing methodologies primarily focus on technical facets, often neglecting the intricate sociotechnical nature of AI systems, which can lead to a misalignment between the development and deployment contexts. To this end, we posit a new problem worth exploring: Incentive Compatibility Sociotechnical Alignment Problem (ICSAP).”

why coded: ICSAP: incentive design as the bridge between technical alignment and deployment context · unit #1, pp. 370

Agents, Alignment, and the Many Faces of Autonomy · Roberta Fischli; Matija Franklin; Arianna Manzini… · 2026

“One criterion the current framework does not address is non-domination. Republican accounts of freedom focus on arbitrary interference as a distinct threat to freedom that cannot be reduced to preference satisfaction or capability (Dagger, 2005; Pettit, 2012). [...] Assessing our proposed alignment strategies against the standard of non-domination therefore falls outside the scope of this paper.”

why coded: Citizen-state relations altered by agents - institutional register (tentative) · unit #15, pp. 17

Humanity's Moral Burden: As AI Advances, Responsibility Escalates (Palgrave Handbook Ch 1… · Benjamin Gregg · 2026

“In some ways, AI mirrors and magnifies values of those persons and groups who design and deploy it. In some ways, it can escape the control of its designers. But, I argue, political community can never escape responsibility for the risks and consequences of its deployment.”

why coded: Escalation thesis: political-community responsibility is inescapable and grows with capability · unit #1, pp. 257

“Artificial intelligence is a global force reshaping institutions, values, and human behavior. [...] Such a force requires governance, and governance involves responsibility for the consequences of developing and deploying AI.”

why coded: Governance as the site of escalating responsibility · unit #2, pp. 269

Responsible Black Boxes: How Virtue Ethics Can Bridge the Responsibility Gap in AI (Palgr… · Hasse J. Hällström; Steven S. Gouveia · 2026

“However, the feasibility of this virtue-ethical approach is debated. Industry and market forces often reward rapid deployment at the cost of careful moral deliberation. Furthermore, the implementation of VE requires moral exemplars with both ethical wisdom and technical prowess, which can be rare in practice.”

why coded: Feasibility depends on market incentives - loops back to institutional design · unit #3, pp. 336

Sincerity as ethical alignment to reconstruct the moral foundation of AI ethics · Toru Iwao; Yusuke Nemoto; Nico Surantha; Kenji Su… · 2026

“a meta-ethical enabling condition of coherence and sincerity, defined as the alignment of truth, intention, action, and trust, is missing. [...] Sincerity is treated as a regulatory orientation for human and institutional actors who design, deploy, and oversee AI systems. [...] the proposed SBEF serves as a revision regulator that clarifies when FAT-style mechanisms should be reconsidered and how such revisions can be publicly justified.”

why coded: Sincerity as meta-condition on governance actors; revision-regulator over FAT compliance · unit #1, pp. 1

Agency and alignment: toward a normative architecture for human-AI interaction · Saša Josifović; Jörg Noller · 2026

“[Human rights gain] meaning through their application in concrete cases, their contestability before courts and administrative bodies, and their integration into role-based structures of responsibility. Accordingly, alignment grounded in human rights is best understood not as an alternative to the proposed normative architecture, but as a paradigmatic instance of it.”

why coded: Human rights as embedded institutional practice, not abstract standard · unit #6, pp. 1

“law functions here as a normatively explicit domain that makes visible the structural conditions under which AI systems can be integrated into practices of justification, interpretation, and responsibility.”

why coded: Law as the paradigm normative interface - justification, interpretation, responsibility · unit #7, pp. 2

Responsibility Attribution for AI-Mediated Damages with Mechanistic Interpretability · Lena Kästner; Johann Cordes; Herbert Zech · 2026

“an unambiguous attribution of responsibility is crucial to ensure legal certainty: for one thing, those affected should be able to assert their rights effectively; for another, various stakeholders should be provided with a clear legal framework to guide their activities. Yet, it remains unclear (a) what conception of causation liability law relies on, (b) how this conception can be utilized to attribute responsibility when human actions rely on the use of opaque AI systems, and (c) how liability for AI-mediated damages should be handled in practice.”

why coded: Legal certainty as the institutional rationale for attribution · unit #2, pp. 188

“Our suggestion is in line with Article 14 of the EU AI Act which states that adequate human oversight in high-risk scenarios demands an overseer to 'properly understand the relevant capacities and limitations of the high-risk AI system and be able to duly monitor its operation, also in view of detecting and addressing anomalies, dysfunctions and unexpected performance' and be able 'to intervene on the operation of the high-risk AI system'.”

why coded: EU AI Act art. 14 codifies the epistemic condition institutionally · unit #9, pp. 195

“Second, we suggest requiring MI as a gold-standard for complex AI systems, at least under certain conditions and where systems are not already inherently interpretable. [...] We propose to require MI specifically where high risks and high stakes come together.”

why coded: MI as regulatory gold standard where high risk meets high stakes · unit #12, pp. 197

Beyond Preference-based Value-alignment (IEAI Research Brief Q2 2026) · Julia Li · 2026

“Jobin et al.'s (2019) survey of AI ethics guidelines finds broad convergence on abstract principles but significant divergence in how those principles are operationalized. This suggests that abstract ethical commitments are insufficient without domain-specific guidance.”

why coded: Jobin convergence/divergence redux - domain-specific normative standards needed beyond the EU AI Act · unit #12, pp. 7

Tapping into Basotho 'Ethical Governance Resources' for a Decolonised AI Governance (Palg… · Khali Mofuoa · 2026

“[Lesotho can] contribute to global AI governance through its untapped institutional 'governance resources' of the Pitso (public assembly), Lekhotla (court or council), [the Lekhotla la Baeletsi (council of advisors)], and the Baholisi or Batataisi [guides/mentors].”

why coded: Basotho institutions as functional AI-governance models: assembly, council, advisors, mentors · unit #2, pp. 812

Artificial moral characters: constitutional AI and the challenge of alignment · Jörg Noller · 2026

“the Presidential Decree of the Republic of Albania of September 12, 2025 [...] entrusted [Prime Minister Rama] with the responsibility for establishing and overseeing a 'Virtual Ministry of Artificial Intelligence' named Diella, which was designated as 'Minister for Public Procurement.' The plan is to progressively shift procurement responsibilities to this system.”

why coded: Albania's Diella: real-world institutionalization of AI 'ministerial responsibility' - a live governance case · unit #3, pp. 3

“If alignment is relational and extended, its success cannot be measured by static compliance but by ethical resilience—the capacity of moral ecologies to absorb disruption, adapt, and regenerate. [...] artificial moral characters act not as substitutes for human judgment but as ethical infrastructures—scaffolds that support deliberation, empathy, and critique.”

why coded: Ethical resilience of the ecology as the success metric; AMCs as infrastructure, not judges · unit #6, pp. 12

Justifications for Democratizing AI Alignment and Their Prospects · Andre Steingrüber; Kevin Baum · 2026

“For an AI's alignment to be actually coercive would not just depend on the relationship between the users and the aligned AI but crucially also on certain background conditions. [...] You wouldn't be free to do so, for example, if using the specific AI assistant were the de facto or de jure standard for going shopping. [...] But if [...] you can just go and use another AI or buy the meat yourself, then you are not being coerced.”

why coded: Actual coercion depends on background monopoly/lock-in conditions - institutional structure determines legitimacy · unit #8, pp. 155