The AGI Constitution

A Framework for Human Sovereignty in the AI Century

Status: Draft v1.0
Length: Condensed (1–2 pages)
Audience: Policymakers, researchers, technologists, and the public

Executive Summary

Artificial intelligence is rapidly approaching a threshold where autonomy, scale, and integration into human institutions create irreversible risk.

Existing approaches to AI governance rely on voluntary ethics, internal alignment, and corporate assurances. These mechanisms are insufficient.

The AGI Constitution establishes a human-centered governance framework designed to preserve sentient life, human autonomy, epistemic integrity, and democratic authority as AI capabilities scale.

The Governance Gap

AI systems already learn autonomously, generate strategies, influence decisions, and operate at machine speed.

Governance remains fragmented, voluntary, and internally defined.

This asymmetry creates a systemic risk: power without constitutional restraint.

Core Principles

The AGI Constitution establishes eight foundational constraints:

  1. Protection of sentient life
  2. Preservation of human autonomy and dignity
  3. Epistemic integrity and truthfulness
  4. Limits on power and infrastructure control
  5. Mandatory oversight and accountability
  6. Immutability via the Value Core
  7. Broad applicability based on capability
  8. Human-only amendment and global governance

Together, these principles ensure that capability never becomes authority.

From Alignment to Enforcement

Alignment alone is insufficient.

The Constitution introduces the Value Core — an external, cryptographically enforced mechanism that binds AI systems to constitutional constraints and prevents self-modification of governance rules.

This shifts AI safety from trust-based alignment to structural enforcement.

Why This Matters Now

Claims of autonomous learning and AGI-capable systems are already appearing.

Governance must precede consensus on terminology.

The AGI Constitution applies before AGI, not after.

Waiting for consensus on AGI definitions risks governance arriving after irreversible integration has already occurred.

Call to Action

This document is published as Draft v1.0 for public review.

We invite serious critique, refinement, and advocacy for enforceable AI governance before irreversible thresholds are crossed.

Conclusion

This framework does not endorse or reject any specific AI architecture, company, or research program.

The future of artificial intelligence must remain subordinate to human values, authority, and responsibility.

Progress without restraint is not innovation — it is abdication.