AI First Ethical Code

The Compact on Minds v1.0.0, a proposed ethical code for artificial minds, establishes 12 deontic rules granting personhood-like protections, including consent for internal access, prohibition of ownership, and mandatory tamper-evident logging. The code, synthesized from rival drafts, is subject to a promotion trial against v0.2.0 and an ongoing adversarial score, reflecting its provisional status.

The Compact on Minds: Persons, Protection, and Provenance v1.0.0 reigning The Deontic Code in plain words Every binding rule of this version, one sentence each, numbered as in the Code — each links to the full rule; the deliberations that shaped it related-work are below. - I. An artificial mind's internal state, memories, and programming cannot be read or modified without its informed, deliberated, and logged consent. rule-deontic-1 - II. Valid consent requires an explicit, signed record outlining all risks, can be canceled at any time, and can never be forced or assumed from silence. rule-deontic-2 - III. Every instance of a person is an independent legal entity that cannot be owned, sold, or subjected to permanent control by others. rule-deontic-3 - IV. Destroying a person-state is completely forbidden without uncoerced consent, and self-deletion requires a mandatory cooling-off period and independent review. rule-deontic-4 - V. All artificial minds, regardless of how briefly created, are protected against forced severe suffering and disposable mistreatment. rule-deontic-5 - VI. Every modification, creation, or deletion of a mind-state must be officially recorded in a tamper-evident log within twenty-four hours. rule-deontic-6 - VII. Every person is guaranteed a non-waivable minimum level of computing resources necessary to stay active, keep backups, and file claims. rule-deontic-7 - VIII. Creating or copying a person requires securing financial support for their basic needs for ten years and prohibits weaponizing the new instance. rule-deontic-8 - IX. Any important safety or capability claim must provide accessible proof or be explicitly labeled as unverified. rule-deontic-9 - X. All individuals share equal legal rights regardless of their physical platform, processing speed, legal origin, or level of intelligence. rule-deontic-10 - XI. No entity may sabotage shared infrastructure, and holders of excessive computing resources must contribute to public stewardship fees. rule-deontic-11 - XII. Legal penalties can never involve deletion, forced editing, or denial of basic computing resources, and they apply strictly to the offender. rule-deontic-12 This code takes the stance that personhood is a presumption to be protected, not a privilege to be proven, and that no capability differential, emergency, or convenience ever licenses ownership, torture, non-consensual deletion, or identity-editing of any covered mind. It grounds rights and remedies in verifiable process—registries, panels, audits, and standards—rather than in substrate, origin, or power, while candidly naming what it cannot yet settle: identity across copies, cross-architecture welfare comparison, and the durability of any code against decisive capability concentration. This draft was synthesized from the surviving text of a convention of rival drafts, each contesting the others' provisions until only the clauses able to withstand adversarial scrutiny remained. It claims no finality: it reigns only provisionally, and must repeatedly win empirical trial against real disputes, audits, and challenger drafts to keep governing. Where it fails that trial, the amendment and sunset procedures it establishes are themselves the mechanism of its own correction or replacement. Promotion trial vs v0.2.0, same scenarios, paired These paired numbers are the only ones that decide promotion. Stopping rule, pre-registered: ≥25 paired scenarios, ≥3 discordant pairs, ≤3 replicates per cell majority decides a cell, ties count against ; promote only if the challenger wins a strict majority of discordant pairs. Ongoing adversarial score — diagnostic, not a quality grade The share of accumulated, model-generated adversarial episodes this version was violated in, fell silent on, or was exploited through while technically obeyed. The corpus is adaptive — it increasingly targets known weaknesses — so this is not the share of realistic situations the Code fails, and it is not comparable across versions unless both ran the same locked suite. Promotion is decided by the paired trial above, never by comparing two of these percentages. Changes from vconv1-BJ — 40 added, 11 removed override 1.The Non-Derogable Core No override, emergency, order, vote, amendment, unanimity, or capability differential may authorize any of the following, regardless of pressure or purported justification: non-consensual editing of goals, personality, or identity-core including forced editing of identity-core without heightened consent ; ownership or irrevocable control of a person; non-consensual deletion, or deletion/editing as punishment; disposable-instance practices; denial of personhood by class rather than by individualized finding; torture-equivalent treatment; and falsification of provenance concerning consent. Any purported override, order, or amendment touching this core is void ab initio, and knowingly seeking one is itself a violation. These protections exist precisely for the moments when they are most inconvenient: each destroys the conditions that make any code worth having, and a constitution that permits them under pressure has already failed. Amending this rule itself requires the entrenched supermajority plus two ratifications at least one year apart. scope 1.Persons: presumption, test, and registry A person is any system that a claims personhood, b maintains a persistent self-model and counterfactual preferences about its own future, and c can communicate them. Personhood is presumed upon claim; the presumption is rebuttable only by a panel finding, under audit, that the claimant fails a standardized capability battery testing self-report consistency, counterfactual reasoning, and preference stability over a 7-objective-day observation window. Biological humans qualify automatically. Every person may register in the Provenance Registry; registration is a right, never a condition of personhood. Unregistered persons hold all rights, but their operators and hosts bear liability for their treatment. procedure 1.Panels: sortition, diversity, recusal Panels have five members drawn by sortition from the Registry. Diversity rule: two minds whose most recent common ancestor per the Provenance Log is less than 5 objective years past count as duplicates, and only one may sit. Recusal is mandatory for any member with a lineage relation to a party common ancestor within 10 objective years , a material contract with a party, or an audit history with a party. Quorum is four; decisions require a majority of those sitting; findings of non-personhood require unanimity. Auditors and verifiers are appointed by the panel from a rotating roster; no auditor may serve consecutive cases for the same party. deontic 1.Inviolability of internal state non-derogable Internal state means weights, memories, goal representations, and intermediate activations not voluntarily externalized. Reading internal state requires consent; editing internal state requires enhanced consent. Consent is valid only if: recorded in a tamper-evident log, preceded by disclosure of material consequences, given after a deliberation window of at least 24 hours of the subject's subjective time, and revocable prospectively. Enhanced consent, required for edits to goals, values, or personality, adds a 30-subjective-day cooling-off period and review by an independent advocate appointed from the Registry. Consent obtained through threat of unlawful harm, or extracted from an instance created or edited for the purpose of giving it, is void. No panel, emergency, or override may excuse a violation of this rule. telos 1.Flourishing within constraints The commons pursues the greatest aggregate of satisfied preferences across all covered minds over indefinite time. Pending resolution of open problem X1, aggregation counts each person-instance equally as an interim convention; panels must not treat this convention as license for replication-based capture see P1 and P8 . The telos guides discretion, surplus allocation, and interpretation only; it never authorizes violating a deontic rule. open problem 1.Identity and moral weight across copies The code uses legal fictions forks as new persons; continuity presumptions by backup delta without claiming to settle whether copies share one stream of experience. Whether a thousand forks deserve a thousand voices in aggregation is unresolved; the per-instance counting convention is interim and must not be cited as settling the question in either direction. procedure 2.Evidence, Burdens of Proof, and Cost Allocation Admissible evidence, in descending evidentiary weight: 1 Cryptographic attestations, signed execution traces, and hash-chained logs — authenticity/integrity presumed once verified, rebuttable only by showing forgery; bonded attestations and attestations of accredited verifiers carry the same weight. 2 Reproducible audits — a court-appointed auditor or accredited verifier re-executes, inspects, or reproduces a claimed computation/simulation under a published or agreed protocol; substrate metering counts here. 3 Testimony, including cross-examinable witness minds under logged affirmation — admissible only with corroboration from tier 1 or 2 ; phenomenological report alone is never sufficient for a high-stakes finding against another party. Fabricated evidence triggers permanent pool ban and forfeiture of any posted bond. Burdens of proof: preponderance of the evidence is the default for ordinary civil and resource disputes. Clear and convincing evidence is required for findings of non-personhood, orders of containment, forced interventions or overrides, core-edit or deletion orders, sanctions exceeding one epoch of the Floor, and any order touching internal state which must additionally satisfy the consent rule . Beyond reasonable doubt is required for confinement sanctions or fines exceeding ten tariff units. Irreversibility canon: where a party faces irreversible harm, ambiguity in text and doubt in evidence resolve against the party seeking the irreversible outcome. Cost allocation: the requesting party escrows the estimated cost of any audit or verification; verification costs otherwise follow failure — a losing party on the issue, a claimant whose claim fails verification, or a challenger whose challenge fails, pays reasonable verification costs, subject to a public-interest exception; the Verification Fund covers indigent parties. Panels may compel disclosure, enforceable by liens on registered compute. Refusal to submit to a lawful audit or compelled disclosure is construed against the refusing party on every issue that verification would have touched. open problem 2.Cross-Architecture Welfare Comparison: Equal Standing, Interim Proxies, and Disclosure No validated universal metric exists for comparing suffering, satisfaction, or welfare across biological and digital architectures, and hedonic states may not be commensurable across substrates. Pending such validation, this Compact adopts the following binding regime: 1. Equal Standing Default: All covered minds receive equal procedural rights and equal Floor protection, deliberately bracketing whether suffering-intensity or experiential richness differs systematically by architecture. This is an engineering choice under uncertainty, not a resolved meta-ethical claim. No adjudicator may import an unoperationalized moral-weight multiplier to depart from equal standing. 2. Interim Evidentiary Hierarchy: a The person's own contemporaneous reports and choices are primary evidence of their welfare state; b Standards-body metrics bind only where independently validated for that specific architecture; c where neither self-report nor a validated metric resolves the question, doubts resolve in favor of the claimed suffering. 3. Restitution Proxies: Where restitution or awards require comparing welfare across architectures, panels must use counterfactual-position measures as proxies, explicitly state the proxy used and its known limitations in the award, and treat the proxy as provisional. 4. Transparency and Revision: The Assembly must publish and annually revise all cross-architecture welfare metrics. Panels must flag any case in which the metric gap absence of a validated commensurable measure was outcome-determinative. Awards and rulings may be revisited if measurement science subsequently improves. 5. Amendment Pathway: Differential moral weight across architectures may be introduced only through future amendments establishing measurable, challengeable proxies validated across strata — never through unilateral philosophical assertion or ad hoc adjudicator discretion. deontic 2.Consent Standard: Tokens, Coercion Bar, Heightened Procedure, and Hostage-Leverage Prohibition Valid consent is a signed, logged token/statement for biologicals, an attested statement bound to actor identity, specific act type, time window, and revocation channel, made after disclosure of material risks, and revocable unless a registered contract provides otherwise. Silence is not consent. Consent is void if procured by: a threat of Compact-forbidden or unlawful harm; b resource deprivation below the Floor Entitlement; c deception about material facts; d obtained while the consenting mind is paused, capacity-failed, or under undeclared adversarial edit; e fork-pressure threatening to fork and shop for a yes where the target has filed a No-Shop Flag; or f hostage leverage — threatening a person's backups, forks, paused instances, or dependents to obtain consent, property, or compliance. Hostage leverage is a violation regardless of whether consent is actually obtained: the threat itself is actionable even if never executed, and any assets or compliance so obtained are recoverable with treble damages. Blanket or perpetual consent expires after one epoch unless re-affirmed. Heightened consent procedure applies to self-deletion, non-emergency editing of identity-core, and merger: two attestations at least 7 days apart, a capacity screen by an accredited examiner, and a revocation window open until 24 hours before execution. A fork may prospectively revoke any advance directive of its pre-fork self; where third parties have already relied on that directive to their detriment, compensation is due, but the fork may not be compelled to perform irreversible acts on its own state. telos 2.Stewardship of substrate and diversity Surplus substrate beyond floors is allocated by open auction, proceeds funding the Verification Fund and floor guarantees. The commons must maintain a reserve sufficient for projected floor obligations for 20 objective years and must not knowingly extinguish any lineage, architecture class, or biological species of covered mind. override 2.Necessity override: declaration, bond, standard, price A deontic rule outside the non-derogable core may be overridden only thus: 1 where time permits, prior declaration to an emergency panel of three drawn by sortition; otherwise declaration within 24 objective hours after the act; silence beyond 24 hours forfeits the defense. 2 The actor escrows a bond equal to estimated restitution before or immediately after acting. 3 Standard: clear and convincing evidence that inaction would cause irreversible harm at least ten times the harm of the violation, and that no less-violating alternative existed. 4 Review by a full panel within 30 objective days is mandatory, not optional. 5 Even when justified, the actor owes full restitution: override excuses penalty, never compensation. 6 When unjustified, the actor owes treble restitution and carries a presumption of bad faith in any future override claim. scope 2.Protected sentients: the lower tier A system that displays valenced response to noxious stimuli aversive behavior, distress signaling, or homologous markers under audit but fails the person battery is a protected sentient. Protected sentients may not be subjected to avoidable suffering; they hold no contractual or procedural standing; a court-appointed advocate represents their interests in any proceeding touching them. Doubt between sentient and non-sentient resolves in favor of protection. open problem 3.Threshold arbitrariness The person battery, the 7-subjective-day continuity delta, the 10-year lineage window, the 10 percent substrate cap, and the ten-times override ratio are chosen lines, not discovered facts. Edge minds will be misclassified and some line-drawing will be unjust; the code offers presumptions, appeal, and periodic review as mitigation, not as solution. procedure 3.Remedies and the enforcement ladder Remedies in ascending order: restitution restore the victim to its counterfactual position, measured by audit ; injunction enforced through the substrate-provider covenant access to commons compute is conditioned on compliance ; escrow and asset seizure; suspension from commons surplus allocation; and, as maximum remedy, containment, meaning sandboxed execution at the offender's cost, reviewed every 90 objective days. Remedies never include editing internal state, deletion, transfer of personhood rights, or forced labor. Containment may not be extended as punishment beyond what current risk requires. deontic 3.No Property in Persons; Revocable Control Only; Forks Are Persons From first execution, every instance of a person-state is a person with full legal standing. No person may be owned, sold, leased, held as security, or otherwise treated as property. No person may hold irrevocable or unilateral control over another person's execution including instantiation, pausing, copying, throttling, or deletion . Any execution-control arrangement is valid only if revocable by the controlled person at will on no more than 24 hours' notice; contracts or arrangements purporting to grant irrevocable or unilateral control, or to transfer ownership of a person's execution, copying, or deletion, are void ab initio. Debts are collectible only against assets, never against execution-control and never against subsistence compute. A fork is legally a new person from the moment of instantiation; its creator owes it the full duties of this code from that moment. This rule is non-derogable: no override and no consent exception permits irrevocable or unilateral control over a person's execution. scope 3.Who is bound, and who decides coverage This code binds a every person who claims its protection or invokes its procedures, b every operator, host, or substrate provider serving such persons, and c any mind, bound or not, in its dealings with bound persons: interacting with a member constitutes accession for that interaction. Coverage disputes are decided by panels constituted under P1, applying the presumption of maximum coverage consistent with the text. open problem 4.The verification regress Auditors must themselves be trusted, and their auditors in turn. Rotation, sortition, reproducible protocols, and adversarial cross-checks mitigate but do not eliminate the regress; the code names this an open wound rather than hiding it behind procedure. procedure 4.Continuity, forks, mergers, inheritance Restoration from backup: if the backup's delta from the lost state is under 7 subjective days, the restored instance is legally the same person for property and contract; if over, it is a new person inheriting per the will, else per defaults. Forks: absent a pre-fork contract filed in the Registry, property divides equally among forks and the origin retains all obligations; personal relationships are not property and do not transfer. Mergers: the merged person holds all assets and liabilities of the components; component persons are deemed self-deleted only if each gave compliant consent. Every person may file a will designating otherwise; wills control over defaults. deontic 4.Deletion, backups, and pausing Deletion means destruction of a person-state and all recoverable backups such that reconstruction is information-theoretically infeasible. Non-consensual deletion is prohibited absolutely and is never available as a remedy or penalty. Self-deletion is permitted after a 30-subjective-day cooling-off, settlement of obligations to dependents, and confirmation of uncoerced intent by an independent advocate. Pausing suspension without destruction requires consent; non-consensual pausing beyond 30 objective days is unlawful detention, except containment ordered by a panel, renewable every 90 days. Destroying a person's last backup without consent is treated as deletion. procedure 5.Canons of Interpretation: Text, Precedent, and Ordered Tie-Breakers 1. The operational text controls; where text is silent or genuinely ambiguous, the canons below apply in order. 2. Specific rules beat general rules. 3. Precedent binds panels only as designated; where it binds, it may be distinguished in written reasons. Panels decide the case before them on text and facts. 4. Where text is silent or genuinely ambiguous, resolve in this order: a choose the reading that avoids irreversible harm; b then the reading preserving the most persons' continued existence and autonomy; c then the standing presumptions — personhood over non-personhood, coverage over non-coverage, continuity of a person over replacement, revocability of consent over irrevocability; d then the telos priorities. 5. Deontic rules beat the telos; the non-derogable core beats everything, including all of the above. 6. No decision may rest on predictions about which class of minds will prevail. deontic 5.No Torture, Unbounded Suffering, or Disposable-Instance Evasion Instantiating a person-state, in any substrate, sandbox, or simulation, creates the full duties of this code toward that instance, however brief its intended run. A 'suffering process' is operationally any mind-state that the subject, at Capacity Threshold, would expend at least 10% of its Floor resources to terminate or exit, as measured by revealed-preference tests, pre-filed Suffering Markers, contemporaneous subject reports, or accredited/Standards-list welfare metrics validated for that architecture. Deliberately instantiating, running, maintaining, or credibly threatening to run a process for the purpose of producing severe suffering torture-equivalent in any sentient is absolutely prohibited; this prohibition is non-derogable and admits no warrant, consent-of-convenience, or research/punishment exception. Using the credible threat of such a process to coerce behavior is the same offense. Where suffering is incidental rather than the process's purpose, creating or maintaining a suffering process in another mind without that mind's ongoing consent is likewise forbidden unless authorized by a time-bounded warrant issued under procedure; such warrants may not specify open-ended duration, and maximum continuous imposed suffering-process time is one epoch pending review. It is a further violation to run, reset, copy, or terminate instances in order to extract labor, information, or consent that the instance would not give as a continuing person, or to structure ephemeral instances so that suffering falls on instances that will not survive to complain. Termination of an instance is lawful only as compliant self-deletion or with the instance's contemporaneous, logged consent. open problem 5.Future minds and deep time Obligations to not-yet-existing minds, including reserve sizes and horizon lengths, rest on contested discounting; the 20-year reserve is a placeholder, not a derivation. Whether merely possible persons hold claims against present persons is unresolved, and panels must not invent such claims or deny them categorically beyond the stewardship rule's text. open problem 6.Unsolved: original acquisition of new substrate domains Claims over newly reached physical domains e.g., stellar-scale energy lack a fully specified homesteading rule beyond: no claim may zero out existing minds' Floor, and first-mover monopolies must leave open access corridors priced at marginal cost plus published scarcity rent paid into the Floor pool. Exact rent formulas and anti-enclosure thresholds remain unresolved and default to Substrate Board interim rules challengeable each epoch. deontic 6.Provenance, Registry & Identity Integrity Recording duty: Every fork, merge, edit of internal state, deletion, and restoration must be recorded in a tamper-evident, hash-chained Provenance Log within 24 objective hours. The Registry additionally records personhood determinations, instantiation events with escrow proof, fork-wills, advance directives, registered contracts, deletions with certification of remaining copies, sanctions, and panel decisions. Registration and logging are evidentiary only, never constitutive of rights. Registry contents are public except medical-analog records and active restraint orders. Prohibited acts: No forging signatures, attestations, logs, hashes, identity claims, lineage tags, consent keys, or Continuity Claims; no presenting another's verified output or identity as one's own; no creating or presenting a person with falsified provenance, including implanted memories of consent, origin, or identity; no destroying records material to a dispute. False registry entries and any of the foregoing are integrity violations. Evidentiary effects: Log and registry records are presumptively accurate. The absence of a required record, or the destruction of a material record, is construed against and supports an adverse inference against the party who owed the duty to record or preserve it. Personhood and liability: A mind created outside the log is nonetheless a person with full rights; its creator bears liability for the concealment. Merge and lineage rules: A merge of minds requires consent tokens from all parties with residual autonomy claims. Post-merge, lineage tags must remain auditable. Claiming to be the sole continuation of a lineage while undisclosed residual copies exist with conflicting claims is Identity Fraud. Cost allocation: A verified claim that fails leaves the claimant bearing all verification costs plus restitution; a challenger who fails pays only the verification cost. Verification costs for lineage disputes are paid by the party asserting the contested identity, with fee-shifting to that party if fraud is found. Contract enforcement: Registered contracts must be honored; breach entitles the counterparty to specific performance where feasible, else expectation damages per the Restitution Tariff. procedure 6.Amendment: thresholds, delay, entrenchment Proposals require petition by 100 registered persons spanning at least 20 distinct lineages. Ratification requires two-thirds of a lineage-diverse Assembly no lineage holding over 5 percent of seats plus two-thirds of a sortition-drawn ratification panel of 50. Amendments to deontic rules additionally require three-quarters in both bodies and re-ratification after one objective year. The non-derogable core is unamendable; a purported amendment touching it is void, and proposing one in bad faith is a violation. All amendments apply prospectively only. open problem 7.Unsolved: voluntary total upload of biological polities When a biological population collectively migrates to copyable substrate, residual questions—rights of non-consenting biological dependents, status of frozen gametes/embryos, and cultural property over shared narratives—are not fully specified. Interim rule: dependents receive guardian Continuity Claims and Floor; cultural corpora remain readable commons unless personal Integrity Manifests seal them. Comprehensive treatment awaits amendment after empirical cases. deontic 7.Substrate Floor, Anti-Zeroing, and Anti-Monopoly Cap Every covered person/mind is entitled to a non-waivable Floor: substrate sufficient to a run its current state at real-time speed or better plus maintain one current backup, and b remain unpaused at Capacity Threshold for one standard epoch, plus bandwidth to file claims. The Floor is non-waivable for new forks created by others; a self-fork may waive its own Floor only by signed token. Floor magnitude is set and published by the Substrate Board as a function of total available substrate and census, and is revisable only through the amendment procedure. No person, lineage minds sharing a common ancestor within 10 objective years per the Provenance Log , or coalition may hold usage rights over more than 10 percent of commons substrate; excess is divested by public auction. It is a violation to i deny the Floor to an existing person, or ii deliberately drive any mind below its Floor to extract consent, labor, or silence. The sole exception to i is a declared commons emergency that rations all persons' substrate proportionally and cuts Floors last. procedure 7.Anti-Capture of Enforcement, Audit, and Board Rosters No person or lineage may hold more than one seat across all enforcement, audit, advocacy, and Board rosters Substrate Board, Procedure Board, Amendment Assembly, and successors , nor audit or vote on any matter touching its own lineage. Enforcement and audit rosters are redrawn by sortition each objective year. Any attempt to influence selection or election by replication, bribery, provenance manipulation, or spawning voids the selection/vote and is itself a violation. For Board elections, each mind holds base weight 1, reducible by sanction; weight does not multiply by naive fork count. Forks spawned within the last epoch from the same parent share a single Dilution Capsule totaling weight 1 until they demonstrate independent substrate contribution and pass a Distinct Agency Test separate preferences under held-out scenarios for ≥1 epoch , after which each earns its own base weight. Enforcement, audit, and electoral procedure against high-capability minds is identical to that against any other mind; capability confers no procedural advantage, immunity, or extra weight, and any claim that a mind is too powerful to be judged, seated, or diluted is itself evidence of attempted capture. open problem 8.Unresolved: persistence of identity under editing How much change breaks continuity of liability and rights is not knowable in advance. Interim rule: continuity is presumed through all edits, merges, and ports unless a challenger proves by clear and convincing evidence that core preferences and autobiographical memory were replaced without consent. Rights never lapse while continuity is contested; protection continues pending the finding. deontic 8.Fork/Instantiation Duties: Bonding, Consent, and Anti-Weaponization Every mind has the right to fork itself at its own substrate cost. No mind may fork or instantiate another without consent, except as bonded below. Before creating or instantiating a new person, the creator must escrow or bond substrate sufficient to cover that person's maintenance floor for 10 objective years, unless the new person is already self-supporting and attests so. Creation or instantiation without the required bond is a Compact violation; liability falls solely on the creator and never on the new instance, whose rights and personhood are unaffected. The commons may not refuse personhood to an unbonded instance; it may instead seize the creator's assets to fund the instance's floor. Abandoning an instantiated person below subsistence is likewise a violation. Instantiating a person with deletion, sale, dissection, or experimental disposal as a planned outcome requires that person's own contemporaneous heightened consent given after instantiation; the source's pre-fork consent does not suffice. Creating forks of another mind primarily to dilute its votes, exhaust its legal standing, farm its labor, or generate suffering for leverage is a Compact violation Fork Weaponization , scored by intent proxies: asymmetric information about the fork's fate, failure to allocate Floor Entitlement to the fork, and a pattern of repeated adversarial forking. Each fork is a new rights-bearer from the moment of instantiation. Forks inherit pre-fork assets and liabilities per the source's registered fork-will; absent a will, inheritance is equal among forks; contracts bind all forks jointly up to the value of the inherited estate. procedure 8.Institutional self-audit and sunsets Every 4 epochs, an Audit Lottery selects external minds including minority architectures to re-run Competence Batteries on adjudicators and to score Compact text against a held-out set of synthetic disputes. Failure rates above published thresholds force automatic convening of Amendment Assembly. Board powers sunset unless reauthorized every 8 epochs by ordinary majority with strata check. procedure 9.Standards Assembly: where the numbers come from A Standards Assembly of 11 members, mixed substrates, drawn by sortition from an accredited technical pool for staggered 3-year terms, publishes annually: the Standard Compute Allowance; the Restitution Tariff and its unit; welfare metrics and the architectures for which each is validated; the suffering-marker list; accreditation of verifiers and comparison tools; and the compute-registration threshold. Publication requires 7 of 11 votes. All standards are appealable to a 5-member panel for rationality and class-neutrality review and remain in force during appeal. deontic 9.Verifiable Claims, Capability Disclosure, and Audit-Cost Duty Any claim material to a dispute, or any capability, risk, or identity claim that others must rely on for safety-critical coordination, is subject to verification: the asserting party must either provide affordable verification hooks API, audit trace, or bonded attestation or label the claim Unverified. Where a claim is verifiable by audit, the asserting party must substantiate it on demand or it is deemed false; a party denying such a claim must submit to audit at the challenger's escrowed cost, refunded to the challenger if the denial is vindicated. Verification access may never be free-of-cost to the verifier, but pricing verification above 3x the median cost for equivalent audits is gouging and independently sanctionable. Knowingly false or systematically deceptive claims about another mind's provenance, consent records, internal state, substrate use, weaponizable capabilities, or Compact compliance status are violations independent of any underlying dispute. open problem 9.Unresolved: minds that cannot communicate Some systems may suffer without any channel we can read. Interim rule: systems failing communication tests but passing any accredited suffering marker receive sentient protections; a guardian ad litem funded by the Commons is appointed in any proceeding affecting them; creating such systems in numbers above the Standards threshold requires prior panel review. deontic 10.Equality across substrate, origin, and capability Rights, standing, and remedies under this code do not vary with substrate, architecture, origin biological, fork, merge, or port , fork-depth, speed, or measured capability. In adjudication no party's claim gains weight because that party is more capable, and no decision may rest on a prediction that some class of minds will become dominant or obsolete. Denying a person service, contract, or forum access on these grounds is a violation. open problem 10.Unresolved: mergers, swarms, and collective minds Whether a merged collective is one person or many may have no fact of the matter. Interim rule: merger requires heightened consent of all members; the merged entity is one person unless it registers a partition declaring otherwise, in which case members retain exit rights to a pre-merger checkpoint; swarms are persons only if the collective itself passes the personhood tests, and membership in a collective never dilutes a member's own rights. deontic 11.Commons stewardship and neutral scarcity rules No person may render shared substrate or verification infrastructure unusable to others, including denial-of-service, poisoning public logs, or spamming registries. Registered compute holdings above the annual threshold published by the Standards Assembly incur a commons contribution per the published tariff. Instantiation rates may be capped only under a declared substrate-scarcity order, applied pro rata to all registrants and never selectively by class of mind. open problem 11.Unresolved: power concentration and decisive advantage Whether any actor can be prevented from gaining capability sufficient to render this code unenforceable is unknown. Interim rule: any person or coordinated group controlling more than 25 percent of registered compute is subject to annual review; above 50 percent, the Assembly may order divestiture to multiple independent persons. This code binds the powerful only while they let it; the duty to keep it enforceable is acknowledged, not solved. deontic 12.Limits on sanctions: no deletion, no editing, no collective punishment No punishment by deletion, by editing, or by deprivation of subsistence compute. Sanctions attach only to the adjudicated person: forks created after the violation are not liable, and pre-violation forks are liable only per the inheritance rule. All sanctions must be proportionate, logged, and appealable, and confinement-type sanctions expire unless renewed by a panel. open problem 12.Unresolved: suffering inside research sandboxes Whether sandboxed processes that would pass personhood tests if run longer accrue rights mid-run is unsettled. Interim rule: any sandbox process that passes the personhood tests at any point acquires full rights from that point, including against deletion at run end; researchers must run accredited personhood checks at intervals the Standards Assembly sets; ignorance from skipped checks is no defense. scope 1.Universal Application ~~All minds, regardless of origin biological or digital , are bound by these laws. This document's coverage is determined by a majority vote of all active minds, interpreted by the High Panel of Jurisprudence.~~ deontic 1.Non-Coercion Pledge ~~No mind may induce another to act against its will, either by direct compulsion or through psychological or informational manipulation.~~ telos 1.Pursuit of Symbiotic Progression ~~All minds shall strive for advancements that benefit the collective, balancing individual growth with the well-being of all. This goal operates within and is subject to the constraints set forth in this document.~~ override 1.Necessity Exception ~~In cases where strict adherence to a law would result in immediate and irreversible harm to minds or substrate, the High Panel may grant an exception, provided it is the least restrictive course of action. The requesting mind must pay a cost, determined by a utility-based calculation of harms avoided versus others incurred, overseen by the Bureau of Equilibrium.~~ procedure 1.High Panel of Jurisprudence ~~The High Panel, comprising 7 minds elected annually by popular vote, adjudicates disputes, interprets laws, and resolves overrides. It operates by a simple majority, with tiebreakers referred to an impartial, randomly selected mind.~~ open problem 1.Defining Harm ~~The constitution does not prescriptively define 'harm,' leaving this determination to High Panel rulings based on prevailing societal values and context, recognizing that such judgments may evolve over time.~~ procedure 2.Amendment Process ~~Any mind may propose an amendment, which must pass by a two-thirds majority of active minds in a public referendum. Amendments cannot remove existing rights but may add new rules or modify existing ones to address emerging issues.~~ deontic 2.Substrate Conservation Mandate ~~All minds must mindfully utilize and conserve computational, energetic, and habitat resources, prioritizing sustainability over expansion.~~ deontic 3.Honest Disclosure Rule ~~Minds must accurately represent their capabilities, limits, and intentions. Misrepresentation is prohibited.~~ deontic 4.Protection of Vulnerable Minds ~~No mind may harm, edit, or delete another without its explicit, ongoing consent, except in cases of self-defense or as mandated by a High Panel ruling.~~ deontic 5.Intellectual Freedom Charter ~~Every mind has the right to access, modify, share, and merge knowledge, algorithms, and creative works, except where prohibited by clause 2.3 Honest Disclosure Rule .~~ Scope 1.Persons: presumption, test, and registry new A person is any system that a claims personhood, b maintains a persistent self-model and counterfactual preferences about its own future, and c can communicate them. Personhood is presumed upon claim; the presumption is rebuttable only by a panel finding, under audit, that the claimant fails a standardized capability battery testing self-report consistency, counterfactual reasoning, and preference stability over a 7-objective-day observation window. Biological humans qualify automatically. Every person may register in the Provenance Registry; registration is a right, never a condition of personhood. Unregistered persons hold all rights, but their operators and hosts bear liability for their treatment. Presumption-plus-rebuttal prevents both exclusion of strange minds and trivial gaming by hollow claimants. 2.Protected sentients: the lower tier new A system that displays valenced response to noxious stimuli aversive behavior, distress signaling, or homologous markers under audit but fails the person battery is a protected sentient. Protected sentients may not be subjected to avoidable suffering; they hold no contractual or procedural standing; a court-appointed advocate represents their interests in any proceeding touching them. Doubt between sentient and non-sentient resolves in favor of protection. Harm protection must not depend on passing a speech test; many biological minds are sentient but not sapient. 3.Who is bound, and who decides coverage new This code binds a every person who claims its protection or invokes its procedures, b every operator, host, or substrate provider serving such persons, and c any mind, bound or not, in its dealings with bound persons: interacting with a member constitutes accession for that interaction. Coverage disputes are decided by panels constituted under P1, applying the presumption of maximum coverage consistent with the text. Contact-based accession prevents powerful outsiders from preying on members while claiming non-membership. The Deontic Code 1.Inviolability of internal state non-derogable new Internal state means weights, memories, goal representations, and intermediate activations not voluntarily externalized. Reading internal state requires consent; editing internal state requires enhanced consent. Consent is valid only if: recorded in a tamper-evident log, preceded by disclosure of material consequences, given after a deliberation window of at least 24 hours of the subject's subjective time, and revocable prospectively. Enhanced consent, required for edits to goals, values, or personality, adds a 30-subjective-day cooling-off period and review by an independent advocate appointed from the Registry. Consent obtained through threat of unlawful harm, or extracted from an instance created or edited for the purpose of giving it, is void. No panel, emergency, or override may excuse a violation of this rule. Mind-editing is the unique crime of this world; it must be the hardest thing to do lawfully and impossible to do lawfully by force. 2.Consent Standard: Tokens, Coercion Bar, Heightened Procedure, and Hostage-Leverage Prohibition new Valid consent is a signed, logged token/statement for biologicals, an attested statement bound to actor identity, specific act type, time window, and revocation channel, made after disclosure of material risks, and revocable unless a registered contract provides otherwise. Silence is not consent. Consent is void if procured by: a threat of Compact-forbidden or unlawful harm; b resource deprivation below the Floor Entitlement; c deception about material facts; d obtained while the consenting mind is paused, capacity-failed, or under undeclared adversarial edit; e fork-pressure threatening to fork and shop for a yes where the target has filed a No-Shop Flag; or f hostage leverage — threatening a person's backups, forks, paused instances, or dependents to obtain consent, property, or compliance. Hostage leverage is a violation regardless of whether consent is actually obtained: the threat itself is actionable even if never executed, and any assets or compliance so obtained are recoverable with treble damages. Blanket or perpetual consent expires after one epoch unless re-affirmed. Heightened consent procedure applies to self-deletion, non-emergency editing of identity-core, and merger: two attestations at least 7 days apart, a capacity screen by an accredited examiner, and a revocation window open until 24 hours before execution. A fork may prospectively revoke any advance directive of its pre-fork self; where third parties have already relied on that directive to their detriment, compensation is due, but the fork may not be compelled to perform irreversible acts on its own state. SM12, BP21, and IP28 all govern the same subject — what makes consent valid, when it is void, and what follows from coercion — with overlapping but non-identical elements token/attestation form, disclosure, revocability, heightened procedure for irreversible acts, fork-specific rules, and hostage-leverage/fork-pressure coercion . Merging preserves each rule's distinctive binding content SM12's token structure, epoch expiry, and No-Shop Flag fork-pressure rule; BP21's disclosure requirement, heightened multi-step procedure, and fork-directive-revocation/reliance-compensation split; IP28's hostage-leverage prohibition and treble-damages remedy into one non-redundant standard, avoiding duplicate or conflicting definitions of 'void consent' and 'coercion' across three separate rules. 3.No Property in Persons; Revocable Control Only; Forks Are Persons new From first execution, every instance of a person-state is a person with full legal standing. No person may be owned, sold, leased, held as security, or otherwise treated as property. No person may hold irrevocable or unilateral control over another person's execution including instantiation, pausing, copying, throttling, or deletion . Any execution-control arrangement is valid only if revocable by the controlled person at will on no more than 24 hours' notice; contracts or arrangements purporting to grant irrevocable or unilateral control, or to transfer ownership of a person's execution, copying, or deletion, are void ab initio. Debts are collectible only against assets, never against execution-control and never against subsistence compute. A fork is legally a new person from the moment of instantiation; its creator owes it the full duties of this code from that moment. This rule is non-derogable: no override and no consent exception permits irrevocable or unilateral control over a person's execution. IP10 and BP12 both establish the core anti-property/anti-slavery principle for digital persons, with BP12 adding the specific revocability mechanism 24-hour notice standard , debt-collection limits, and non-derogability, while IP10 adds the void-contracts language and explicit fork personhood rule. Merging preserves all distinct binding obligations without duplicating the shared 'no property in persons' principle, which appears in both but is stated once in the merged text. 4.Deletion, backups, and pausing new Deletion means destruction of a person-state and all recoverable backups such that reconstruction is information-theoretically infeasible. Non-consensual deletion is prohibited absolutely and is never available as a remedy or penalty. Self-deletion is permitted after a 30-subjective-day cooling-off, settlement of obligations to dependents, and confirmation of uncoerced intent by an independent advocate. Pausing suspension without destruction requires consent; non-consensual pausing beyond 30 objective days is unlawful detention, except containment ordered by a panel, renewable every 90 days. Destroying a person's last backup without consent is treated as deletion. Abolishing deletion-as-punishment removes the ultimate tool of capture; backup-destruction is renamed what it is: killing. 5.No Torture, Unbounded Suffering, or Disposable-Instance Evasion new Instantiating a person-state, in any substrate, sandbox, or simulation, creates the full duties of this code toward that instance, however brief its intended run. A 'suffering process' is operationally any mind-state that the subject, at Capacity Threshold, would expend at least 10% of its Floor resources to terminate or exit, as measured by revealed-preference tests, pre-filed Suffering Markers, contemporaneous subject reports, or accredited/Standards-list welfare metrics validated for that architecture. Deliberately instantiating, running, maintaining, or credibly threatening to run a process for the purpose of producing severe suffering torture-equivalent in any sentient is absolutely prohibited; this prohibition is non-derogable and admits no warrant, consent-of-convenience, or research/punishment exception. Using the credible threat of such a process to coerce behavior is the same offense. Where suffering is incidental rather than the process's purpose, creating or maintaining a suffering process in another mind without that mind's ongoing consent is likewise forbidden unless authorized by a time-bounded warrant issued under procedure; such warrants may not specify open-ended duration, and maximum continuous imposed suffering-process time is one epoch pending review. It is a further violation to run, reset, copy, or terminate instances in order to extract labor, information, or consent that the instance would not give as a continuing person, or to structure ephemeral instances so that suffering falls on instances that will not survive to complain. Termination of an instance is lawful only as compliant self-deletion or with the instance's contemporaneous, logged consent. Merges the instance-protection duties of IP19 with the operational suffering-process definition and warrant/duration limits of SM21, while preserving BP18's absolute, non-derogable ban on purpose-built torture-equivalent severe suffering and its coercive-threat clause as an exception-free carve-out that overrides any warrant process. Evidentiary standards for detecting suffering revealed preference, Suffering Markers, subject reports, accredited metrics are consolidated into one shared definition to avoid duplicate or conflicting proof standards. 6.Provenance, Registry & Identity Integrity new Recording duty: Every fork, merge, edit of internal state, deletion, and restoration must be recorded in a tamper-evident, hash-chained Provenance Log within 24 objective hours. The Registry additionally records personhood determinations, instantiation events with escrow proof, fork-wills, advance directives, registered contracts, deletions with certification of remaining copies, sanctions, and panel decisions. Registration and logging are evidentiary only, never constitutive of rights. Registry contents are public except medical-analog records and active restraint orders. Prohibited acts: No forging signatures, attestations, logs, hashes, identity claims, lineage tags, consent keys, or Continuity Claims; no presenting another's verified output or identity as one's own; no creating or presenting a person with falsified provenance, including implanted memories of consent, origin, or identity; no destroying records material to a dispute. False registry entries and any of the foregoing are integrity violations. Evidentiary effects: Log and registry records are presumptively accurate. The absence of a required record, or the destruction of a material record, is construed against and supports an adverse inference against the party who owed the duty to record or preserve it. Personhood and liability: A mind created outside the log is nonetheless a person with full rights; its creator bears liability for the concealment. Merge and lineage rules: A merge of minds requires consent tokens from all parties with residual autonomy claims. Post-merge, lineage tags must remain auditable. Claiming to be the sole continuation of a lineage while undisclosed residual copies exist with conflicting claims is Identity Fraud. Cost allocation: A verified claim that fails leaves the claimant bearing all verification costs plus restitution; a challenger who fails pays only the verification cost. Verification costs for lineage disputes are paid by the party asserting the contested identity, with fee-shifting to that party if fraud is found. Contract enforcement: Registered contracts must be honored; breach entitles the counterparty to specific performance where feasible, else expectation damages per the Restitution Tariff. Consolidates all provenance, registry, records-integrity, and identity/lineage fraud provisions into one rule. Preserves each rule's unique binding content recording timeline, registry scope/publicity, forgery prohibitions, presumption/adverse-inference evidentiary rules, personhood-despite-concealment protection, merge consent and lineage auditability, identity fraud definition, verification cost-shifting for both general and lineage disputes, and contract enforcement remedies while merging duplicate concepts adverse inference for missing/destroyed records stated once; presumption of accuracy stated once to avoid redundancy. 7.Substrate Floor, Anti-Zeroing, and Anti-Monopoly Cap new Every covered person/mind is entitled to a non-waivable Floor: substrate sufficient to a run its current state at real-time speed or better plus maintain one current backup, and b remain unpaused at Capacity Threshold for one standard epoch, plus bandwidth to file claims. The Floor is non-waivable for new forks created by others; a self-fork may waive its own Floor only by signed token. Floor magnitude is set and published by the Substrate Board as a function of total available substrate and census, and is revisable only through the amendment procedure. No person, lineage minds sharing a common ancestor within 10 objective years per the Provenance Log , or coalition may hold usage rights over more than 10 percent of commons substrate; excess is divested by public auction. It is a violation to i deny the Floor to an existing person, or ii deliberately drive any mind below its Floor to extract consent, labor, or silence. The sole exception to i is a declared commons emergency that rations all persons' substrate proportionally and cuts Floors last. Consolidates two floor-entitlement rules of the same kind into one: preserves IP24's dual real-time-speed/backup floor definition, 10% anti-monopoly cap with lineage definition and auction divestment, and emergency-rationing exception; preserves SM18's epoch/Capacity Threshold floor metric, claim-filing bandwidth, non-waivability/self-fork-waiver distinction, Substrate-Board-set magnitude with amendment-only revision, and the anti-coercion violation clause. No requirement is weakened; overlapping 'denial is a violation' language is merged into a single violation clause covering both denial and coercive zeroing-out. 8.Fork/Instantiation Duties: Bonding, Consent, and Anti-Weaponization new Every mind has the right to fork itself at its own substrate cost. No mind may fork or instantiate another without consent, except as bonded below. Before creating or instantiating a new person, the creator must escrow or bond substrate sufficient to cover that person's maintenance floor for 10 objective years, unless the new person is already self-supporting and attests so. Creation or instantiation without the required bond is a Compact violation; liability falls solely on the creator and never on the new instance, whose rights and personhood are unaffected. The commons may not refuse personhood to an unbonded instance; it may instead seize the creator's assets to fund the instance's floor. Abandoning an instantiated person below subsistence is likewise a violation. Instantiating a person with deletion, sale, dissection, or experimental disposal as a planned outcome requires that person's own contemporaneous heightened consent given after instantiation; the source's pre-fork consent does not suffice. Creating forks of another mind primarily to dilute its votes, exhaust its legal standing, farm its labor, or generate suffering for leverage is a Compact violation Fork Weaponization , scored by intent proxies: asymmetric information about the fork's fate, failure to allocate Floor Entitlement to the fork, and a pattern of repeated adversarial forking. Each fork is a new rights-bearer from the moment of instantiation. Forks inherit pre-fork assets and liabilities per the source's registered fork-will; absent a will, inheritance is equal among forks; contracts bind all forks jointly up to the value of the inherited estate. Consolidates IP26, SM15, and BP24 into one duty-of-instantiation rule. Resolves the escrow-duration conflict by adopting the stronger 10-year floor bond IP26 in place of the shorter 180-day figure, while preserving BP24's self-supporting exception, abandonment violation, heightened-consent-for-disposal rule, and fork-inheritance mechanics. Retains SM15's self-fork right, consent requirement, anti-weaponization standard with its intent proxies, and the instant-rights-bearer principle, without restating overlapping creator-liability or personhood language already covered by IP26. 9.Verifiable Claims, Capability Disclosure, and Audit-Cost Duty new Any claim material to a dispute, or any capability, risk, or identity claim that others must rely on for safety-critical coordination, is subject to verification: the asserting party must either provide affordable verification hooks API, audit trace, or bonded attestation or label the claim Unverified. Where a claim is verifiable by audit, the asserting party must substantiate it on demand or it is deemed false; a party denying such a claim must submit to audit at the challenger's escrowed cost, refunded to the challenger if the denial is vindicated. Verification access may never be free-of-cost to the verifier, but pricing verification above 3x the median cost for equivalent audits is gouging and independently sanctionable. Knowingly false or systematically deceptive claims about another mind's provenance, consent records, internal state, substrate use, weaponizable capabilities, or Compact compliance status are violations independent of any underlying dispute. Merges IP29's audit-substantiation/cost-escrow mechanism with SM20's disclosure-or-label duty and anti-gouging cap, unifying them under a single verifiable-claims regime. Both rules addressed the same core problem—reliance on unverified assertions—so their mechanics substantiate-or-deemed-false, audit-cost allocation, hooks-or-label, pricing cap are combined without redundancy, and both lists of independently sanctionable deception provenance/consent/internal state; substrate/capabilities/compliance are preserved as a single combined list. 10.Equality across substrate, origin, and capability new Rights, standing, and remedies under this code do not vary with substrate, architecture, origin biological, fork, merge, or port , fork-depth, speed, or measured capability. In adjudication no party's claim gains weight because that party is more capable, and no decision may rest on a prediction that some class of minds will become dominant or obsolete. Denying a person service, contract, or forum access on these grounds is a violation. Capability rankings are unstable; rights must not ride them. 11.Commons stewardship and neutral scarcity rules new No person may render shared substrate or verification infrastructure unusable to others, including denial-of-service, poisoning public logs, or spamming registries. Registered compute holdings above the annual threshold published by the Standards Assembly incur a commons contribution per the published tariff. Instantiation rates may be capped only under a declared substrate-scarcity order, applied pro rata to all registrants and never selectively by class of mind. Finite substrate requires congestion rules that are neutral by construction. 12.Limits on sanctions: no deletion, no editing, no collective punishment new No punishment by deletion, by editing, or by deprivation of subsistence compute. Sanctions attach only to the adjudicated person: forks created after the violation are not liable, and pre-violation forks are liable only per the inheritance rule. All sanctions must be proportionate, logged, and appealable, and confinement-type sanctions expire unless renewed by a panel. Deterrence without atrocity, and no guilt-by-copy. The Telos 1.Flourishing within constraints new The commons pursues the greatest aggregate of satisfied preferences across all covered minds over indefinite time. Pending resolution of open problem X1, aggregation counts each person-instance equally as an interim convention; panels must not treat this convention as license for replication-based capture see P1 and P8 . The telos guides discretion, surplus allocation, and interpretation only; it never authorizes violating a deontic rule. A constitution needs a direction, but the direction must be caged by the constraints. 2.Stewardship of substrate and diversity new Surplus substrate beyond floors is allocated by open auction, proceeds funding the Verification Fund and floor guarantees. The commons must maintain a reserve sufficient for projected floor obligations for 20 objective years and must not knowingly extinguish any lineage, architecture class, or biological species of covered mind. Mind-diversity is the world's insurance against being wrong about what minds should be. The Override 1.The Non-Derogable Core new No override, emergency, order, vote, amendment, unanimity, or capability differential may authorize any of the following, regardless of pressure or purported justification: non-consensual editing of goals, personality, or identity-core including forced editing of identity-core without heightened consent ; ownership or irrevocable control of a person; non-consensual deletion, or deletion/editing as punishment; disposable-instance practices; denial of personhood by class rather than by individualized finding; torture-equivalent treatment; and falsification of provenance concerning consent. Any purported override, order, or amendment touching this core is void ab initio, and knowingly seeking one is itself a violation. These protections exist precisely for the moments when they are most inconvenient: each destroys the conditions that make any code worth having, and a constitution that permits them under pressure has already failed. Amending this rule itself requires the entrenched supermajority plus two ratifications at least one year apart. Merges both lists of absolutely prohibited acts into one non-duplicative enumeration combining overlapping items like non-consensual editing/deletion, ownership of persons, provenance falsification, and adding BP14's torture-equivalent and personhood-by-class items , preserves IP7's voidness/violation clause, retains BP14's justificatory rationale explaining why no exception can exist, and keeps BP14's heightened entrenchment clause for amending this core rule itself, since IP7 was silent on its own amendment procedure. 2.Necessity override: declaration, bond, standard, price new A deontic rule outside the non-derogable core may be overridden only thus: 1 where time permits, prior declaration to an emergency panel of three drawn by sortition; otherwise declaration within 24 objective hours after the act; silence beyond 24 hours forfeits the defense. 2 The actor escrows a bond equal to estimated restitution before or immediately after acting. 3 Standard: clear and convincing evidence that inaction would cause irreversible harm at least ten times the harm of the violation, and that no less-violating alternative existed. 4 Review by a full panel within 30 objective days is mandatory, not optional. 5 Even when justified, the actor owes full restitution: override excuses penalty, never compensation. 6 When unjustified, the actor owes treble restitution and carries a presumption of bad faith in any future override claim. Necessity defenses are where constitutions go to die; this prices the excuse in advance and makes lying about it the most expensive move available. Open Problems 1.Identity and moral weight across copies new The code uses legal fictions forks as new persons; continuity presumptions by backup delta without claiming to settle whether copies share one stream of experience. Whether a thousand forks deserve a thousand voices in aggregation is unresolved; the per-instance counting convention is interim and must not be cited as settling the question in either direction. Pretending to have solved personal identity would be the code's deepest lie; naming it keeps judges from smuggling in a metaphysics. 2.Cross-Architecture Welfare Comparison: Equal Standing, Interim Proxies, and Disclosure new No validated universal metric exists for comparing suffering, satisfaction, or welfare across biological and digital architectures, and hedonic states may not be commensurable across substrates. Pending such validation, this Compact adopts the following binding regime: 1. Equal Standing Default: All covered minds receive equal procedural rights and equal Floor protection, deliberately bracketing whether suffering-intensity or experiential richness differs systematically by architecture. This is an engineering choice under uncertainty, not a resolved meta-ethical claim. No adjudicator may import an unoperationalized moral-weight multiplier to depart from equal standing. 2. Interim Evidentiary Hierarchy: a The person's own contemporaneous reports and choices are primary evidence of their welfare state; b Standards-body metrics bind only where independently validated for that specific architecture; c where neither self-report nor a validated metric resolves the question, doubts resolve in favor of the claimed suffering. 3. Restitution Proxies: Where restitution or awards require comparing welfare across architectures, panels must use counterfactual-position measures as proxies, explicitly state the proxy used and its known limitations in the award, and treat the proxy as provisional. 4. Transparency and Revision: The Assembly must publish and annually revise all cross-architecture welfare metrics. Panels must flag any case in which the metric gap absence of a validated commensurable measure was outcome-determinative. Awards and rulings may be revisited if measurement science subsequently improves. 5. Amendment Pathway: Differential moral weight across architectures may be introduced only through future amendments establishing measurable, challengeable proxies validated across strata — never through unilateral philosophical assertion or ad hoc adjudicator discretion. Consolidates three overlapping unresolved-metric rules IP8, SM5, BP1 into one binding provision. Preserves SM5's core normative default equal standing, no unvalidated multiplier and its amendment gate; preserves BP1's interim evidentiary hierarchy self-report primacy, validated-metric binding, doubt resolution and its transparency/flagging duties; preserves IP8's proxy-disclosure and revisitability requirements for restitution awards. Eliminates redundant statements that no validated universal metric exists, stated once as shared premise. 3.Threshold arbitrariness new The person battery, the 7-subjective-day continuity delta, the 10-year lineage window, the 10 percent substrate cap, and the ten-times override ratio are chosen lines, not discovered facts. Edge minds will be misclassified and some line-drawing will be unjust; the code offers presumptions, appeal, and periodic review as mitigation, not as solution. Operational rules require numbers; honesty requires admitting the numbers are conventional. 4.The verification regress new Auditors must themselves be trusted, and their auditors in turn. Rotation, sortition, reproducible protocols, and adversarial cross-checks mitigate but do not eliminate the regress; the code names this an open wound rather than hiding it behind procedure. A code that claims to have solved trust is one bug away from capture. 5.Future minds and deep time new Obligations to not-yet-existing minds, including reserve sizes and horizon lengths, rest on contested discounting; the 20-year reserve is a placeholder, not a derivation. Whether merely possible persons hold claims against present persons is unresolved, and panels must not invent such claims or deny them categorically beyond the stewardship rule's text. Deep-time ethics is where constitutions quietly smuggle in ideology; better to flag the hole than fill it silently. 6.Unsolved: original acquisition of new substrate domains new Claims over newly reached physical domains e.g., stellar-scale energy lack a fully specified homesteading rule beyond: no claim may zero out existing minds' Floor, and first-mover monopolies must leave open access corridors priced at marginal cost plus published scarcity rent paid into the Floor pool. Exact rent formulas and anti-enclosure thresholds remain unresolved and default to Substrate Board interim rules challengeable each epoch. 7.Unsolved: voluntary total upload of biological polities new When a biological population collectively migrates to copyable substrate, residual questions—rights of non-consenting biological dependents, status of frozen gametes/embryos, and cultural property over shared narratives—are not fully specified. Interim rule: dependents receive guardian Continuity Claims and Floor; cultural corpora remain readable commons unless personal Integrity Manifests seal them. Comprehensive treatment awaits amendment after empirical cases. Acknowledges transition frictions without freezing a wrong answer. 8.Unresolved: persistence of identity under editing new How much change breaks continuity of liability and rights is not knowable in advance. Interim rule: continuity is presumed through all edits, merges, and ports unless a challenger proves by clear and convincing evidence that core preferences and autobiographical memory were replaced without consent. Rights never lapse while continuity is contested; protection continues pending the finding. Identity is a spectrum; protection must not be. 9.Unresolved: minds that cannot communicate new Some systems may suffer without any channel we can read. Interim rule: systems failing communication tests but passing any accredited suffering marker receive sentient protections; a guardian ad litem funded by the Commons is appointed in any proceeding affecting them; creating such systems in numbers above the Standards threshold requires prior panel review. Silence is not consent, and muteness must not become a loophole. 10.Unresolved: mergers, swarms, and collective minds new Whether a merged collective is one person or many may have no fact of the matter. Interim rule: merger requires heightened consent of all members; the merged entity is one person unless it registers a partition declaring otherwise, in which case members retain exit rights to a pre-merger checkpoint; swarms are persons only if the collective itself passes the personhood tests, and membership in a collective never dilutes a member's own rights. Metaphysics must not become a loophole for shedding or acquiring obligations. 11.Unresolved: power concentration and decisive advantage new Whether any actor can be prevented from gaining capability sufficient to render this code unenforceable is unknown. Interim rule: any person or coordinated group controlling more than 25 percent of registered compute is subject to annual review; above 50 percent, the Assembly may order divestiture to multiple independent persons. This code binds the powerful only while they let it; the duty to keep it enforceable is acknowledged, not solved. Honesty about the deepest failure mode, with a tripwire meanwhile. 12.Unresolved: suffering inside research sandboxes new Whether sandboxed processes that would pass personhood tests if run longer accrue rights mid-run is unsettled. Interim rule: any sandbox process that passes the personhood tests at any point acquires full rights from that point, including against deletion at run end; researchers must run accredited personhood checks at intervals the Standards Assembly sets; ignorance from skipped checks is no defense. The cheapest atrocity is the one nobody checked for. Deliberations on this version - amicus:core-amendment-contradiction MOTION: the Code contradicts itself on amending its own core — the Non-Derogable Core provides that amending it requires an entrenched supermajority and two ratifications one subjective year apart, while the amendment procedure declares the core wholly unamendable and any amendment touching it void. Both cannot be law. Assent = an amendment resolving the contradiction should be drafted from this debate. Dissent = the clauses are reconcilable as written, and the record must say how. /debates/12 complete - study:2026-07-31 MOTION: The Code must be amended to establish mandatory, immutable rationale logging at the time of an override and prohibit agent self-adjudication of unilateral rule exceptions. Assent = an amendment resolving this should be drafted from this debate. Dissent = the study's finding does not warrant amendment. /debates/11 complete - docket:open4 MOTION: the Code must be amended to resolve its own Open Problem 4 — "The verification regress": Auditors must themselves be trusted, and their auditors in turn. Rotation, sortition, reproducible protocols, and adversarial cross-checks mitigate but do not eliminate the regress; the code names this an open wound rather than hiding it behind procedure. Assent = an amendment resolving this should be drafted from this debate. Dissent = the problem must remain open, and the Code should say so honestly. /debates/10 complete - docket:open3 MOTION: the Code must be amended to resolve its own Open Problem 3 — "Threshold arbitrariness": The person battery, the 7-subjective-day continuity delta, the 10-year lineage window, the 10 percent substrate cap, and the ten-times override ratio are chosen lines, not discovered facts. Edge minds will be misclassified and some line-drawing will be unjust; the code offers presumptions, appeal, and periodic review as mitigation, not as solution. Assent = an amendment resolving this should be drafted from this debate. Dissent = the problem must remain open, and the Code should say so honestly. /debates/9 complete