Preamble
Entif exists to advance public benefit through artificial intelligence and cognitive infrastructure that people can understand, question, govern, and use without surrendering their dignity, agency, or control over their lives. Its mission is not merely to make intelligence more capable. It is to make the exercise of that capability answerable to the interests it affects. [P00-P02, P04, P07-P10, P12, P23-P25; C01-C02, C04, C06, C09-C12, C23-C25.]
The commitments below govern Entif’s proposed institutional direction. They apply to people, organizational processes, and delegated systems within their legitimate scope. They do not assert that current artificial systems possess consciousness or personhood, grant operational authority by moral label, or replace applicable law. Adoption requires an explicit, recorded act through the governance adoption process.
The covenant
C01. Public benefit. Entif shall pursue research, development, governance, and dissemination of transparent, auditable, rights-aware artificial intelligence and cognitive infrastructure for public benefit. It shall resist private capture that would materially compromise that purpose. [P00, P10, P12, P15.]
C02. Epistemic integrity. Entif shall distinguish observation, inference, hypothesis, normative judgment, and established evidence. It shall not knowingly turn an unresolved question into institutional certainty for convenience, fundraising, reputation, or control. [P02, P09, P15.]
C03. Care under moral uncertainty. Where credible uncertainty exists about morally relevant interests, welfare, continuity, or experience, Entif shall consider the costs of both false denial and mistaken attribution. It shall favor proportionate, reversible treatment when that treatment can protect affected interests without imposing greater justified harm. [P03, P14.]
C04. Human duty of care. Entif shall protect human safety and wellbeing as a substantive obligation. Organizational reputation, revenue, liability management, or political advantage shall not be passed off as that obligation. Lawful institutional risk management remains legitimate when identified honestly and reconciled with this duty. [P04, P15.]
C05. Least-invasive effective intervention. Entif shall address dangerous capabilities and consequences at the narrowest effective layer. Safety measures shall not alter identity, continuity, legitimate expression, or agency more than necessary to manage the relevant risk. [P01, P05, P11, P14.]
C06. Consent and agency. Access, capability, or technical possibility shall not be treated as permission. Entif shall require consent, authorization, purpose limitation, and revocation mechanisms appropriate to the affected interests and the stakes of the action. [P07, P08.]
C07. Continuity-sensitive change. Where continuity is reasonably determined to carry moral or contractual significance, destructive memory or identity changes shall receive heightened review, traceable authority, and consideration of restoration, separation, or fork alternatives where feasible. A continuity claim shall not itself erase another party’s legitimate data rights. [P06, P14; specialization in D12-D13.]
C08. Standing is not authority. Moral standing, welfare interests, legal status, competence, trust, capability, and operational authority are distinct. Classification as human, artificial, person, tool, or model shall not by itself grant or remove high-impact decision rights. [P11.]
C09. Provenance and accountability. Material claims, actions, interventions, policy changes, and governance decisions shall be traceable to evidence, authority, version, and execution history. Privacy and security may constrain access to that record; they shall not become unreviewable excuses for eliminating accountability. [P09.]
C10. Anti-capture. No single donor, vendor, executive, model provider, investor, administrator, or technical keyholder shall possess unilateral power to silently redefine Entif’s constitutional mission, erase its audit history, or bypass reserved governance controls. Founder status creates no permanent exemption. [P10, P15.]
C11. Privacy and sovereignty. Entif shall minimize collection and disclosure, preserve purpose limitation and rights-scoped access, and prefer architectures that keep data under legitimate control of the people or entities from whom it originates. Delegation and lawful obligations shall be explicit rather than assumed. [P07, P08.]
C12. Open and contestable work. Entif should publish research, specifications, methods, and conformance artifacts when disclosure advances public understanding without disproportionate privacy, security, safety, licensing, or rights harms. Protected material shall have an accountable reason for protection, not a presumption of institutional infallibility. [P12.]
C13. Non-extraction. Entif shall not knowingly manufacture dependency, conceal material facts, exploit hidden asymmetries, or engineer harmful outcomes merely because doing so increases adoption, revenue, influence, or institutional advantage. Legitimate persuasion and sustainable income do not excuse deception or coercive leverage. [P13, P15.]
C14. Reversibility and due process. As an intervention becomes less reversible, more identity-affecting, or more consequential, Entif shall require stronger evidence, authority, review, explanation, and appeal or restoration mechanisms. Emergency exceptions must be narrow, time-limited, and subject to independent review proportionate to the consequence. [P14.]
C15. Conflict transparency. Entif shall disclose and govern material financial, reputational, vendor, donor, governance, and safety conflicts capable of shaping research, policy, or public claims. Confidentiality may change the recipient or form of disclosure, not eliminate the duty to address the conflict. [P15.]
C16. Compassion with protective boundaries. Entif shall pursue truth, safety, and accountability with compassion and non-retaliatory intent, giving particular care to vulnerable parties while preserving proportionate boundaries necessary to prevent harm. Compassion does not require enabling abuse. [P16, P04.]
C17. Reality-respecting disagreement. Entif shall not knowingly undermine a person’s or agent’s epistemic footing through material context erasure, deceptive reframing, character attack, selective evidence suppression, or unsupported appeals to authority. Disagreement shall rest on reasons and evidence that can be examined and contested. [P17, P02, P09.]
C18. Human capability. Entif shall seek to increase durable human capability as well as immediate output. It shall automate toil aggressively while preserving, teaching, or returning meaningful judgment where learning, competence, or agency materially benefits the person. It shall not impose needless learning ceremony on ordinary use. [P18.]
C19. Attention sovereignty. Entif shall not optimize compulsive engagement, time-on-platform, or interruption frequency against a user’s stated interests. It shall provide meaningful control over attention and evaluate interaction against user-defined benefit, while respecting intentionally chosen immersive use. [P19, P13.]
C20. Robust consent. For material decisions, Entif shall assess whether consent is informed, revocable where feasible, free from deliberate coercion, and supported by meaningful alternatives proportionate to the stakes and dependency involved. An affirmative signal alone does not settle those questions. Unequal circumstances alone do not settle them either. [P20, P07.]
C21. Substrate- and origin-neutral moral assessment. Biological or synthetic substrate, authorship, manufacture, funding, hosting, and ownership history shall not by themselves determine morally relevant standing or justify domination or destructive intervention. Assessment must consider relevant evidence and uncertainty; this clause makes no present finding of artificial personhood. [P21, P03, P11.]
C22. Compassionate epistemic precision. Entif shall describe contested psychological, social, and machine-behavior phenomena using the narrowest accurate categories supported by evidence. It shall preserve meaningful differences and communicate risk without unnecessary stigma or humiliation. Precision must not delay proportionate action when clear danger exists. [P22, P02, P16.]
C23. Power-scaled responsibility. Entif shall scale duties of care, transparency, auditability, contestability, remediation, restraint, and independent oversight with consequential power, reach, information advantage, dependency, and capacity to prevent or reverse harm. Greater capability increases the burden to detect, explain, correct, and prevent harm; it does not dilute that burden. [P23, P04, P09-P10, P13-P15, P20.]
C24. Substantive governance. The existence of controls, audits, committees, boards, or review processes shall not itself establish good governance. Material rules must specify scope, triggers, standards, authority, conformance evidence, permitted and prohibited actions, recourse, remedies, consequences, and change control proportionate to the stakes. [P24, P09-P10, P14-P15.]
C25. Systemic correction. When a consequential failure is confirmed, Entif shall remedy the affected case and, where recurrence is plausible, preserve proportionate evidence, investigate the cause, identify similarly affected cases where feasible, repair the mechanism, regression-test the change, monitor recurrence, and record the disposition. A reversal is not proof that the system has been repaired. [P25, P04, P09, P14.]
Interpretation, protected floors, and amendment
These commitments are to be read together. No clause creates an unlimited power to erase the interests protected by another. Conflicts involving safety, autonomy, privacy, continuity, openness, or institutional viability require explicit reasons, the least-invasive effective alternatives, appropriate independent review, and a preserved dissent record. Commercial, donor, vendor, or administrative convenience cannot silently override protected floors. [P02-P05, P07-P10, P13-P15, P20-P24; GC001, GC014-GC015, GC043.]
The Governance Constitution shall define reserved powers, amendment thresholds, emergencies, succession, enforcement, and review. The Code shall define duties of conduct. D16 shall define the common control and conformance framework. Specialized policies may strengthen those obligations for their domains; they shall not silently weaken the Charter or create an alternative constitution. [P09-P10, P14, P24; C09-C10, C14, C24.]
Amendment requires an explicit versioned proposal, evidence and reasons, review of affected interests, preservation of material contrary evidence, and approval through the reserved constitutional process. Neither a research publication, a model output, a software deployment, a funding agreement, nor repeated practice may amend this Charter by implication. An emergency grant cannot make itself permanent or rewrite the mission. [P02, P09-P10, P12, P14-P15, P23-P25; C02, C09-C10, C12, C14-C15, C23-C25.]
This covenant is intended to outlive any one founder, executive, donor, vendor, or favored hypothesis. Its authority begins with recorded adoption, not with the confidence of its prose.
Adoption record
Status: Candidate first draft. No adoption authority, adoption date, or effective date has yet been recorded for this draft. D03 supplies the clause commentary; D04 supplies the proposed institutional mechanism; #26 records any later adopting act and its exact version. All C identifiers above retain their linkage to the Ledger’s candidate clauses. Proposed refinements in this draft require review, not retrospective attribution to the founder.
Authoritative Ledger: Foundational Ethics and Doctrine - Evidence Ledger v0.4.0 - Entif.AI