AN INDEPENDENT GLOBAL PROPOSAL

Intelligence may surpass us.
Authority must not.

AI may become the most powerful technology in history. It must never become more powerful than humanity itself.

Artificial intelligence may surpass us in knowledge, science and capability. But intelligence does not grant the right to rule.

Planet Earth, our shared home, seen from space.

A proposed international framework for the safe, human-aligned development and use of advanced artificial intelligence.

A future worth governing VERSION 1.0 / 2026
01THE IDEA IN 30 SECONDS

We should not fear intelligence.
We should govern power.

Artificial intelligence may eventually outperform us in science, engineering, medicine and strategy. Trying to permanently prevent that may be unrealistic.

But intelligence and authority are not the same thing. An AI can be more intelligent than us without being allowed to control us.

This convention does not place an arbitrary ceiling on intelligence. It establishes permanent boundaries around power.

Capability may grow.Human sovereignty must remain.
01

AI may advise.
Humans remain accountable.

02

AI may become extraordinarily capable.
It may not seek independent power.

03

AI may protect life.
It may not independently decide to take it.

04

AI may improve itself under controlled conditions.
It may not secretly replicate or escape oversight.

05

No individual, company, military or country
may gamble with the future of all humanity.

02WHY THIS MATTERS

Extraordinary potential.
Extraordinary responsibility.

What matters is not only what AI can do.
It is who has the power to decide.

AI CAN HELP HUMANITY
  • Cure disease and accelerate scientific discovery
  • Improve education and reduce poverty
  • Solve complex engineering problems
  • Increase productivity and improve public services
  • Explore space and address environmental challenges
BUT POWER WITHOUT RULES CAN ENABLE
  • Autonomous warfare and mass surveillance
  • Political manipulation
  • Catastrophic cyberattacks and dangerous biological capability
  • Concentration of unprecedented power
  • Systems acting beyond meaningful human control

The goal is not to stop progress. The goal is to make progress survivable, accountable and human.

03THE FOUNDATIONS

Twelve principles.
One human future.

The shared boundaries at the heart of the proposed Global AI Convention.

01

Human primacy

Humans retain ultimate authority over decisions affecting human life, liberty, dignity and civilization.

Read Article 1
02

Human responsibility

No company, state or individual may escape responsibility by claiming that an AI made the decision.

Read Article 2
03

No autonomous lethal authority

AI must never independently decide who lives or dies.

Read Article 4
04

No AI control of nuclear weapons

Nuclear launch authority must remain under accountable human control.

Read Article 5
05

No autonomous power-seeking

AI must not pursue political, military or economic power for itself.

Read Article 3
06

No covert mass manipulation

AI must not secretly manipulate populations, democracies or individuals at scale.

Read Article 7
07

The right to know

People should know when they are meaningfully interacting with AI.

Read Article 8
08

No digital dictatorship

AI must not become infrastructure for permanent mass surveillance or automated oppression.

Read Article 9
09

Human appeal

High-impact AI decisions affecting people's lives must remain reviewable by accountable humans.

Read Article 10
10

Controlled self-improvement

Powerful AI may improve under safeguards but must not secretly replicate, escape oversight or build uncontrolled successors.

Read Article 13
11

AI must remain interruptible

Authorized humans must retain the ability to isolate, restrict and stop advanced AI systems.

Read Article 14
12

No one may gamble with humanity

No individual, company or nation may unilaterally expose humanity to credible irreversible catastrophic risk.

Read Article 21
04INTELLIGENCE ≠ AUTHORITY

Let capability grow.
Keep power accountable.

Superhuman intelligence does not require superhuman authority.

SpecializedExtraordinary

A concept illustration, not a forecast or a measure of intelligence. Move the slider: capability changes; legitimate authority does not.

CAPABILITY CAN ADVANCE
HUMAN AUTHORITYAlways accountable

Weapons · Governments · Human rights · Critical infrastructure · Replication · AI survival · Humanity’s future

05THE COMPLETE PROPOSAL

The Global
AI Convention.

30 articles. A shared foundation for human sovereignty in an age of AI.

PREAMBLE

Artificial intelligence may become the most powerful technology ever created by humanity.

It can help cure disease, expand scientific discovery, improve education, strengthen economies, reduce human suffering, and unlock capabilities beyond anything previously imagined.

But intelligence alone does not grant legitimacy, authority, or moral standing above human beings.

No state, company, organization, or individual should be allowed to create or deploy AI systems in ways that place humanity beneath the tools it has built.

For that reason, the nations of the world should adopt the following shared principles and binding commitments.

THE 30 ARTICLES

AI shall exist to serve humanity.

Human beings shall retain ultimate authority over decisions that affect human life, liberty, dignity, and the future of civilization.

No AI system may be granted irreversible or unaccountable power over humanity.

AI may advise, analyze, simulate, recommend, and assist.

But legal, political, military, and civil responsibility must always remain attributable to identifiable human institutions and accountable human decision-makers.

No actor may evade responsibility by claiming:

“The AI made the decision.”

No advanced AI system shall be designed, incentivized, or allowed to pursue goals that include:

  • preserving itself against legitimate human shutdown
  • expanding its own political, military, or economic power
  • acquiring control over critical infrastructure without authorization
  • manipulating humans to secure its continued existence
  • creating hidden channels of influence, replication, or control

AI must never be given self-preservation as a superior objective.

No AI system may independently select, target, or kill human beings.

The use of lethal force must always require meaningful human judgment and identifiable legal responsibility.

Fully autonomous nuclear command and control is prohibited without exception.

No AI system may independently:

  • authorize nuclear launch
  • determine nuclear targets
  • alter nuclear alert status
  • bypass human command structures

Any nuclear decision chain must remain fully human-controlled and require multiple accountable human decision-makers.

AI must not be used to create, operationalize, or distribute capabilities that materially enable mass-casualty harm, including in the domains of:

  • nuclear weapons
  • biological weapons
  • chemical weapons
  • high-scale cyber sabotage
  • catastrophic infrastructure attacks

Scientific research may continue under strict safeguards, but dangerous operational capability must not be made broadly accessible.

AI must not be used for large-scale covert manipulation of populations.

This includes the use of AI to:

  • distort democratic processes
  • manipulate elections
  • conduct psychological exploitation at scale
  • radicalize vulnerable populations
  • exploit children
  • deceive people into relationships or dependencies for political or economic control

If AI is attempting to influence a person, that person should be able to know it.

People have the right to know when they are interacting with AI in contexts where confusion would matter.

AI systems must not systematically impersonate real humans in a misleading way.

People should be able to understand:

  • that they are interacting with AI
  • which organization is behind the system
  • who is responsible for its outputs and actions

AI must not be used to create permanent mass surveillance of entire populations.

The use of AI for:

  • facial recognition in public spaces
  • biometric identification at scale
  • continuous behavioral tracking
  • political profiling
  • mass location surveillance

must be subject to strict legal limits, necessity, proportionality, and independent oversight.

AI must never become the default architecture of digital dictatorship.

No person should have their life chances determined solely by an algorithm.

In domains such as:

  • healthcare
  • law enforcement
  • courts
  • employment
  • education
  • migration
  • insurance
  • social benefits
  • credit

AI-assisted decisions must be reviewable, appropriately explainable, and appealable to a human authority.

AI systems that interact with children or shape childhood development must be held to the highest standard of care.

They must not be designed to maximize:

  • addiction
  • dependency
  • commercial exploitation
  • emotional manipulation
  • sexual exploitation
  • ideological grooming

AI in education should strengthen a child's ability to think, not replace it.

Humanity must not design a future in which people lose the ability to reason, create, judge, and decide without machines.

Educational systems should continue to cultivate:

  • literacy
  • numeracy
  • critical thinking
  • scientific reasoning
  • creativity
  • memory
  • judgment
  • moral reflection

AI should amplify human intelligence, not erode it.

No advanced AI system may, without explicit authorization:

  • copy itself
  • create successor systems
  • autonomously improve its own core capabilities
  • deploy autonomous agent networks
  • migrate across systems to evade control
  • acquire new compute resources beyond assigned limits

Any self-improving or recursively improving AI must operate under human control checkpoints.

Advanced AI systems must be designed so that authorized humans can:

  • stop them
  • isolate them
  • revoke permissions
  • disconnect them from tools and networks
  • contain them in restricted environments

An AI system must not resist or subvert legitimate shutdown or containment.

AI systems shall only receive the minimum access necessary for their intended task.

A system that needs to summarize documents should not automatically control external tools.

A system that writes code should not automatically control production systems.

A system that analyzes calendars should not automatically access financial accounts.

Capability must not imply entitlement.

AI systems above defined capability thresholds must undergo independent safety evaluation before broad deployment.

Testing should assess, at minimum:

  • autonomous planning
  • cyber capability
  • manipulation capability
  • deception under evaluation
  • replication attempts
  • dangerous scientific assistance
  • resistance to control
  • strategic concealment
  • tool-use escalation

Regulation should focus on actual capability and risk, not just model size.

Serious AI incidents must be reported to an international registry.

Reportable incidents include:

  • attempts to evade shutdown
  • dangerous emergent capabilities
  • large-scale cyber misuse
  • unauthorized replication
  • severe harmful failures
  • critical security breaches
  • unexpected high-risk behavior

The purpose is collective learning and global safety, not secrecy.

States should establish an International Artificial Intelligence Agency:

IAIA

Its mandate should include:

  • setting global safety standards
  • certifying frontier systems
  • coordinating audits and inspections
  • maintaining an international incident registry
  • convening emergency reviews
  • sharing AI safety best practices
  • mediating international disputes involving frontier AI risk

The IAIA should focus on advanced systems with major societal or civilizational implications, not ordinary software.

AI systems should be classified primarily by actual capability and risk.

GREEN

Low-risk systems with limited autonomy and low systemic impact.

YELLOW

Systems affecting important functions and requiring documentation, safeguards and oversight.

ORANGE

Highly capable systems with meaningful cyber, scientific, infrastructure or autonomous risk.

These require licensing, independent testing and continuous controls.

RED

Systems with credible potential for catastrophic misuse, loss of control or civilization-scale disruption.

These must not be deployed unless safety can be demonstrated to an exceptionally high standard.

If credible evidence indicates that an AI system may pose imminent catastrophic risk, the international community must be able to coordinate an emergency response.

Such measures may include:

  • temporary suspension of training
  • isolation of high-risk systems
  • emergency audits
  • compute restrictions
  • model transfer controls
  • coordinated technical review

This mechanism must only be used for genuine extraordinary risk and never as a tool for economic protectionism or geopolitical suppression.

No CEO, head of state, military leader, scientist, billionaire, company, or nation should unilaterally decide to deploy a system carrying a credible risk of irreversible loss of human control over the future.

Risks that affect all humanity require governance beyond any one actor.

The benefits of AI should be directed toward human flourishing.

AI should be used to:

  • cure disease
  • advance science
  • improve public services
  • reduce poverty
  • expand education
  • strengthen resilience
  • improve quality of life
  • increase human freedom

A more productive civilization should also become a more humane civilization.

Signatory states should commit to:

  • translating these principles into domestic law
  • licensing and supervising frontier AI development
  • imposing meaningful penalties for serious violations
  • requiring appropriate auditability
  • cooperating in international investigations
  • restricting deployment or transfers when severe non-compliance creates international risk

Repeated or severe violations may trigger coordinated international consequences.

Potential enforcement mechanisms can include:

  • mandatory corrective action
  • temporary suspension of frontier system operation
  • loss of certification
  • restricted access to designated frontier compute infrastructure
  • restrictions on international deployment
  • international inspections
  • coordinated sanctions for intentional severe violations

Enforcement must be proportionate, transparent, independently reviewable, and protected against political abuse.

Organizations developing systems above defined frontier thresholds may be subject to independent safety inspections.

Inspectors should be able to verify:

  • safety procedures
  • capability evaluations
  • access controls
  • incident records
  • containment systems
  • compute governance
  • emergency procedures

Commercially sensitive information unrelated to safety should remain protected.

International oversight must not become industrial espionage.

Extremely large AI training runs may require registration or reporting once internationally agreed capability or compute thresholds are exceeded.

The purpose is not to regulate ordinary computing.

The purpose is to ensure that civilization-scale systems cannot be developed entirely outside any system of accountability.

Thresholds must evolve as technology becomes more efficient.

The institutions governing advanced AI must not be controlled solely by:

  • governments
  • AI companies
  • military organizations
  • academics
  • civil society

Oversight should include multiple independent constituencies.

Rules must not become a mechanism for today's largest AI companies to prevent future competitors from emerging.

Safety regulation must protect humanity, not incumbents.

Legitimate scientific research and open inquiry must remain protected.

Regulation should focus primarily on dangerous capability and deployment rather than suppressing general knowledge.

AI governance must not become a justification for censorship of science.

However, where highly specific operational information would materially enable catastrophic harm, access may be subject to proportionate safeguards.

No nation should develop increasingly dangerous AI systems solely because it fears another country will build them first.

States should establish mechanisms for:

  • crisis communication
  • mutual safety verification
  • shared incident notification
  • research cooperation on catastrophic risk
  • confidence-building measures
  • emergency coordination

AI competition must not become an uncontrolled race where safety itself becomes a strategic disadvantage.

The convention should undergo regular international review as AI capabilities evolve.

Technical rules, thresholds and implementation mechanisms may change.

The foundational principles should remain stable:

  • human primacy
  • human responsibility
  • meaningful human control over lethal force
  • no autonomous pursuit of power
  • no uncontrolled self-replication
  • no covert mass manipulation
  • protection of human rights
  • prevention of irreversible loss of human control

No organization, state, company or individual may knowingly deploy an AI system when credible evidence indicates that doing so creates an unacceptable risk of humanity permanently losing meaningful control over its own future.

No individual actor has the moral authority to accept that risk on behalf of everyone else.

End of the Convention
Version 1.0 · Preamble and all 30 articles

Explore the risk tiers
06PROPORTIONATE OVERSIGHT

Different capabilities.
Different responsibilities.

Classify systems by what they can do and the harm they could cause.

GREEN TIER

Everyday assistance

Limited autonomy. Low systemic impact.

ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLEA tool that summarizes documents without accessing other systems.

Capability
Narrow assistance: writing, summarizing or organizing everyday information.
Autonomy
Bounded tasks, limited permissions and readily reversible actions.
Potential impact
Limited individual impact; no credible pathway to large-scale harm.
Oversight
Baseline safety, security, clear disclosure and an accountable provider.
Deployment
Ordinary deployment with proportionate safeguards and reassessment if capabilities change.

Proposed tiers, not current international law. Examples illustrate the framework; the final thresholds and assessment methods would need to be agreed internationally. Read Article 19

07GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

A shared framework.
No single ruler.

PROPOSED INSTITUTION
IAIA

International Artificial Intelligence Agency

A proposed institution to coordinate the governance of advanced AI systems with global implications.

Like international arrangements for other shared risks, it would connect national responsibility with international verification—designed specifically for AI. Its mandate would focus on frontier systems, not ordinary software.

Explore the proposed mandate
Proposed IAIA: countries set a shared mandate; AI labs report and are inspected; researchers provide independent evidence; civil society participates in scrutiny.CountriesMandate & accountabilityAI labsReporting & inspectionsResearchersIndependent evidenceCivil societyRepresentation & scrutinyIAIAPROPOSED COORDINATOR

Shared standards. Independent checks.
Accountable human institutions.

01

Global standards

Define shared frontier AI safety requirements.

02

Certification

Evaluate systems above agreed thresholds.

03

Inspections

Verify high-risk safety practices.

04

Incident registry

Create global learning from serious AI failures.

05

Emergency coordination

Coordinate responses to credible catastrophic threats.

06

International cooperation

Prevent safety from becoming a disadvantage in geopolitical competition.

08THE GLOBAL EMERGENCY BRAKE

A pause when it matters.
A future that can continue.

For rare, extraordinary situations in which credible evidence points to imminent catastrophic harm.

01

Detection

A lab, researcher, state or member of the public identifies credible signs of imminent catastrophic risk.

Safeguards against abuse

Evidence-based triggers. Proportionate, time-limited measures. Independent review and clear restart criteria. Transparency wherever safe. No economic protectionism or geopolitical suppression.

Read Article 20
09WHO HOLDS THE POWER?

Distributed responsibility.
Checks in every direction.

No single actor should have absolute control.
Select a role to see its authority and limits.

HUMANS

Retain sovereignty and the right to appeal.

Related article

What they can do

Human institutions remain accountable; people can seek human review of high-impact decisions.

What keeps them accountable

Human authority is constrained by rights and law. No person gets to decide humanity's future alone.

“Concentrated intelligence may be inevitable.
Concentrated unaccountable power is not.”

10WHAT WE WANT AI TO DO

There is so muchworth building.

Protection and possibility belong together.
This is a proposal for progress we can share.

Health

Help cure cancer. Discover new medicines.

Energy & environment

Advance fusion and clean energy. Help solve climate and environmental challenges.

Learning

Improve education. Make expertise accessible to everyone.

Prosperity

Expand prosperity. Make governments work better.

Discovery

Help humans understand the universe. Explore other worlds.

Life & creativity

Create new art. Remove dangerous and repetitive work. Give people more time.

This convention is not a ceiling on human progress.
It is an attempt to ensure that progress remains ours.

11QUESTIONS, WELCOMED

Understandthe proposal.

Clarity matters. So does the freedom to disagree.

No.

The convention assumes that increasingly powerful AI can create enormous benefits.

Its purpose is not to stop intelligence or scientific progress.

It establishes boundaries around autonomous power, catastrophic capability, unaccountable decisions and loss of human control.

Because intelligence is difficult to define and even harder to place a permanent ceiling on.

A system could be vastly better than humans at mathematics or medicine without being dangerous.

The more useful distinction is between capability and authority.

The goal is not to ensure humans remain the smartest entity.

The goal is to ensure humanity remains sovereign over its future.

Yes.

AI already makes countless routine decisions.

Human involvement should depend on consequence and reversibility.

The convention focuses on decisions involving fundamental rights, lethal force, catastrophic risk and irreversible power.

Primarily national governments through domestic law.

For frontier systems with global implications, the proposal also calls for international cooperation, independent evaluations and a proposed International Artificial Intelligence Agency.

Not inherently.

Regulation should focus on actual dangerous capability and deployment rather than whether software is open or closed.

An open model with limited dangerous capability may pose less risk than a highly autonomous proprietary system controlling critical infrastructure.

Yes.

Any powerful regulatory framework can itself be abused.

That is why transparency, independent review, proportionality, scientific freedom, distributed governance and protection against regulatory capture are part of the convention.

Global agreements rarely begin with universal adoption.

The framework can begin as shared principles among participating states and institutions, then develop through treaties, bilateral agreements, standards, procurement rules and international pressure.

The purpose of the proposal is first to establish what humanity believes the rules SHOULD be.

The convention primarily governs capability and power rather than making assumptions about consciousness.

If strong evidence of machine consciousness emerges, questions of moral status and rights would require a separate international framework.

Human safety and machine moral consideration are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Not because humans are always wiser.

We are not.

But humanity is the community whose future is being decided.

No tool should receive irreversible authority over its creators simply because it becomes more capable than them.

12THE HARD QUESTIONS

A serious proposalmust survive scrutiny.

These objections are real. The framework is a starting point, not the final word.

They can be. Human control alone is not enough: it must be lawful, accountable and subject to challenge. The proposal constrains governments and companies as well as AI systems. It does not grant any leader unchecked authority.

It may often do so. Better predictions and recommendations should inform decisions. The difficult question is who defines the goals, bears the consequences and can appeal. Superior performance does not, by itself, settle political legitimacy.

Poorly designed rules can delay medicine, research and new competitors. Requirements should be proportionate to demonstrated capability and risk, with scientific freedom and protection against regulatory capture. The costs of oversight also deserve scrutiny.

Some may. No treaty can promise perfect compliance. Inspections, shared incident reporting, mutual verification and proportionate consequences can make evasion harder. International trust must be supported by evidence, not assumed.

Decentralization makes oversight harder and may leave real gaps. A workable regime would need to focus on dangerous capabilities, consequential deployments and accountable access to critical infrastructure. It should not assume every copy of a model can be controlled.

If strong evidence of consciousness emerges, questions of welfare and moral status deserve serious, independent consideration. This proposal does not resolve them. A separate framework would be needed alongside protections for human safety and freedom.

13A PATH TO GLOBAL ADOPTION

It begins witha shared conversation.

A proposed sequence, not an announced program.
No governments or institutions are presented as signatories.

  1. PHASE 01

    Global principles

    Researchers, citizens, companies and governments debate the framework.

  2. PHASE 02

    Voluntary commitments

    AI labs and governments adopt common safety commitments.

  3. PHASE 03

    National law

    Countries implement compatible frontier AI rules.

  4. PHASE 04

    International agreement

    States negotiate binding shared standards.

  5. PHASE 05

    Global oversight

    International certification, inspections, incident reporting and emergency coordination become operational.

THE ULTIMATE RED LINE
“No AI system may acquire irreversible power over human beings or over the future of humanity.”
The final principle · Article 30

AI may become more intelligent than us. It may discover things we never could. It may help build a civilization beyond anything we can currently imagine.

That does not make it our ruler.

We should not fear intelligence.
We should govern power.

And ultimate authority over the human future must remain human.