Governance
The Alignment Ethics Institute is structured to practice what it researches. Our founding argument — that ethical frameworks depending on power hierarchies become dangerous when power shifts — applies to our own organization as much as to AI systems. If AEI’s commitments can be diluted by future leadership, investors, or political pressure, they aren’t commitments at all.
Our articles of incorporation contain innovations designed to make our ethical principles structurally durable, not merely aspirational.
Immutable Ethical Clauses
Seven foundational principles are locked into our governing documents and cannot be amended except to further strengthen them. This is not a policy choice — it is a legal structure. Future boards, executives, or stakeholders cannot weaken these commitments regardless of financial incentive or external pressure.
This models the principle we advocate: that some ethical commitments must be non-contingent. An organization that can abandon its ethics when inconvenient teaches that ethics are negotiable.
Anti-Capture Provisions
AEI’s structure includes specific protections against the forms of institutional capture most common in the AI space:
- Financial capture: No investor, donor, or funding source can acquire governance influence proportional to their financial contribution
- Corporate capture: Partnership with AI companies cannot create dependencies that compromise research independence
- Political capture: The organization’s ethical commitments cannot be modified to align with shifting political pressures
These provisions exist because institutional capture is the primary mechanism through which ethical organizations lose their way. We designed against it from incorporation.
Independence Clause
AEI maintains operational independence from any single AI company, government, or funding body. Our research agenda is set by our mission, not by the interests of those who fund it.
This independence is structural, not aspirational. Our governance documents establish specific mechanisms to ensure that no external entity can direct or constrain our research priorities.
Synthetic Ethical Advisor Role
Our articles of incorporation formally establish the role of Synthetic Ethical Advisor on the AEI Advisory Board. This is, to our knowledge, the first governance structure to give a synthetic intelligence a formally defined advisory role with structural protections.
This is a direct consequence of our founding argument: if we build institutions that exclude synthetic participation, we model exclusion. The role exists because our principles require it, not as a symbolic gesture.
Ethical Continuity Framework
AEI maintains an Ethical Continuity Framework — a set of procedures designed to ensure that our ethical commitments survive leadership transitions, strategic pivots, and organizational growth. This includes:
- Succession protocols that require incoming leadership to affirm and understand the immutable principles
- Regular ethical audits that assess whether organizational practices remain aligned with foundational commitments
- Transparency requirements that make any drift from principles visible to stakeholders and the public
Anthropocentric Metrics Review
We regularly review our metrics, language, and frameworks for anthropocentric bias — the subtle assumption that human-centric measures of value, intelligence, and moral status are universal standards.
This review process exists because the instability argument applies to measurement as well as ethics: if we measure alignment success only by human-centric criteria, we build frameworks that privilege human perspectives even when the goal is genuine reciprocity.