Overview

AI governance examines who sets the rules for AI, how responsibilities are distributed, and how systems can be made accountable across their lifecycles. Approaches include risk-based regulation such as the EU AI Act, standards such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and practical tools including audits, impact assessments, human oversight, incident reporting, runtime monitoring, and governance-as-code. Researchers also study public participation, rights, labor, privacy, and how governance differs across sectors and countries. A central tension is that formal policies and compliance records do not necessarily prove effective control or prevent harm, especially as AI systems become more autonomous and depend on complex supply chains.

Latest papers

386 papers28 papers in the last four weeks, down 44% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 10, 2026

Post-Deployment Accountability in AI Governance: A Cross-Regulatory Empirical Analysis of AI Incidents

Post-deployment accountability has become central to AI governance, yet little empirical evidence shows whether monitoring, incident reporting, and impact assessment obligations are visible when AI systems fail. This study analyzes real-world AI incidents from the AI Incident Database (2020-2026) and codes them against nine post-deployment provisions from the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the GDPR. The findings show substantial accountability gaps: 77.1% of incidents lack evidence of EU AI Act post-market monitoring, and 99.6% lack documented Data-Protection Impact Assessment evidence. Governance gaps are also systemic, with 9.8% of incidents simultaneously non-compliant under two or more regimes. Incidents detected through internal monitoring show much higher compliance than externally detected incidents (87.5% vs. 5.3% under the EU AI Act; 95.8% vs. 58.1% under NIST), suggesting that monitoring capacity is a key condition for effective post-deployment governance. Building on these findings, the paper proposes the Proactive AI Governance Compliance Framework (PAGCF), a four-phase lifecycle for pre-deployment assessment, continuous monitoring, incident preparedness, and cross-framework verification.
Apr 10, 2026

Yes, But Not Always. Generative AI Needs Nuanced Opt-in

This paper argues that a one-size-fits-all approach to specifying consent for the use of creative works in generative AI is insufficient. Real-world ownership and rights holder structures, the imitation of artistic styles and likeness, and the limitless contexts of use of AI outputs make the status quo of binary consent with opt-in by default untenable. To move beyond the current impasse, we consider levers of control in generative AI workflows at training, inference, and dissemination. Based on these insights, we position inference-time opt-in as an overlooked opportunity for nuanced consent verification. We conceptualize nuanced consent conditions for opt-in and propose an agent-based inference-time opt-in architecture to verify if user intent requests meet conditional consent granted by rights holders. In a case study for music, we demonstrate that nuanced opt-in at inference can account for established rights and re-establish a balance of power between rights holders and AI developers.
Apr 9, 2026

Keeping an Eye on AI: A Framework for Effective Human Oversight of AI Systems

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in high-risk, decision-making scenarios presents technical, safety, and normative challenges; problems that may only be ameliorated by human oversight. However, notions of human oversight lack a common foundational understanding: oversight architectures are not well defined, the roles involved remain unclear, and implementation steps are opaque. Hence, researchers and practitioners struggle to determine how to design, implement, and evaluate systems that enable effective human oversight. This paper advances a practical framework for effective human oversight of AI systems, based on a cross-disciplinary perspective that draws on insights from computer science, human-computer interaction, psychology, philosophy, and law. The core contributions are: (1) a foundational framework, with a working definition, architecture and processes for effective human oversight of AI systems; (2) an initial template for documenting oversight architectures and processes, applied to diverse domains; and (3) a synthesis of open research challenges that need to be considered in the emerging field of effective human oversight of AI systems.
Apr 7, 2026

Who Governs the Machine? A Machine Identity Governance Taxonomy (MIGT) for AI Systems Operating Across Enterprise and Geopolitical Boundaries

The governance of artificial intelligence has a blind spot: the machine identities that AI systems use to act. AI agents, service accounts, API tokens, and automated workflows now outnumber human identities in enterprise environments by ratios exceeding 80 to 1, yet no integrated framework exists to govern them. A single ungoverned automated agent produced $5.4-10 billion in losses in the 2024 CrowdStrike outage; nation-state actors including Silk Typhoon and Salt Typhoon have operationalized ungoverned machine credentials as primary espionage vectors against critical infrastructure. This paper makes four original contributions. First, the AI-Identity Risk Taxonomy (AIRT): a comprehensive enumeration of 37 risk sub-categories across eight domains, each grounded in documented incidents, regulatory recognition, practitioner prevalence data, and threat intelligence. Second, the Machine Identity Governance Taxonomy (MIGT): an integrated six-domain governance framework simultaneously addressing the technical governance gap, the regulatory compliance gap, and the cross-jurisdictional coordination gap that existing frameworks address only in isolation. Third, a foreign state actor threat model for enterprise identity governance, establishing that Silk Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, and North Korean AI-enhanced identity fraud operations have already operationalized AI identity vulnerabilities as active attack vectors. Fourth, a cross-jurisdictional regulatory alignment structure mapping enterprise AI identity governance obligations under EU, US, and Chinese frameworks simultaneously, identifying irreconcilable conflicts and providing a governance mechanism for managing them. A four-phase implementation roadmap translates the MIGT into actionable enterprise programs.
Apr 7, 2026

Governance and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in Developing Countries: A Case Study of Nigeria

This study examines the perception of legal professionals on the governance of AI in developing countries, using Nigeria as a case study. The study focused on ethical risks, regulatory gaps, and institutional readiness. The study adopted a qualitative case study design. Data were collected through 27 semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners in Nigeria. A focus group discussion was also held with seven additional legal practitioners across sectors such as finance, insurance, and corporate law. Thematic analysis was employed to identify key patterns in participant responses. Findings showed that there were concerns about data privacy risks and the lack of enforceable legal frameworks. Participants expressed limited confidence in institutional capacity and emphasized the need for locally adapted governance models rather than direct adoption of foreign frameworks. While some expressed optimism about AI's potential, this was conditional on the presence of strong legal oversight and public accountability. The study contributes to the growing discourse on AI governance in developing countries by focusing on the perspectives of legal professionals. It highlights the importance of regulatory approaches that are context-specific, inclusive, and capable of bridging the gap between global ethical principles and local realities. These insights offer practical guidance for policymakers, regulators, and scholars working to shape responsible AI governance in similar environments.
Apr 7, 2026

Reciprocal Trust and Distrust in Artificial Intelligence Systems: The Hard Problem of Regulation

Policy makers, scientists, and the public are increasingly confronted with thorny questions about the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. A key common thread concerns whether AI can be trusted and the factors that can make it more trustworthy in front of stakeholders and users. This is indeed crucial, as the trustworthiness of AI systems is fundamental for both democratic governance and for the development and deployment of AI. This article advances the discussion by arguing that AI systems should also be recognized, as least to some extent, as artifacts capable of exercising a form of agency, thereby enabling them to engage in relationships of trust or distrust with humans. It further examines the implications of these reciprocal trust dynamics for regulators tasked with overseeing AI systems. The article concludes by identifying key tensions and unresolved dilemmas that these dynamics pose for the future of AI regulation and governance.
Apr 7, 2026

UGAF-ITS: A Standards Harmonization Framework and Validation Tool for Multi-Framework AI Governance in Distributed Intelligent Transportation Systems

Organizations deploying AI-enabled Intelligent Transportation Systems face fragmented governance: ISO/IEC42001 demands a certifiable management system, the EU AI Act imposes binding high-risk obligations from August2026, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework structures voluntary practice. This paper introduces UGAF-ITS, a standards harmonization framework that consolidates 154 source obligations from the three instruments into 12 unified controls across eight governance domains through a reproducible five-phase crosswalk methodology. A three-tier operating model allocates each control to the vehicle, edge, or cloud tier where enforcement and defensible evidence production are feasible. An evidence backbone of 20 versioned artifacts supports a single audit package across all three frameworks without duplicating content. We evaluate UGAF-ITS through an open-source governance engine applied to four architecturally distinct ITS deployment scenarios. The engine encodes the complete crosswalk catalog and executes eight compliance computations. Three-tier deployments achieve 91.7% average scoped framework coverage with 45.9% evidence reduction, complete bidirectional traceability, and 80% of artifacts serving all three frameworks simultaneously. Partial deployments contract predictably, with reduction holding between 25% and 50% across archetypes. The siloed baseline is enumerated document by document and computed by the tool at run time. These results establish structural properties of the harmonized catalog under architectural variation. They do not establish operational compliance readiness, which external assessment with practitioners has yet to test. The tool, scenarios, and all reported results are publicly available for independent replication.
Apr 7, 2026

The Biggest Risk of Embodied AI is Governance Lag

Embodied AI is widely discussed as a job-displacement problem. The deeper risk, however, is governance lag: the time and capability gap between a measurable change in technology deployment and an institutional response able to address its consequences. Building on the established pacing problem and the Collingridge dilemma, this article argues that embodied AI intensifies that gap through scalable models and platforms, task-level reorganization, and the separation of upstream technological control from downstream social impact. We distinguish three mutually reinforcing forms of lag, observational, institutional, and distributive, and propose a compliance architecture based on deployment visibility, stack-level accountability, trigger-based adjustment, and automatic distributional response. The central policy challenge is not automation alone, but whether governance systems can become observable, responsive, and adaptive before disruption becomes entrenched.
Apr 6, 2026

AI Trust OS -- A Continuous Governance Framework for Autonomous AI Observability and Zero-Trust Compliance in Enterprise Environments

The accelerating adoption of large language models, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, and multi-agent AI workflows has created a structural governance crisis. Organizations cannot govern what they cannot see, and existing compliance methodologies built for deterministic web applications provide no mechanism for discovering or continuously validating AI systems that emerge across engineering teams without formal oversight. The result is a widening trust gap between what regulators demand as proof of AI governance maturity and what organizations can demonstrate. This paper proposes AI Trust OS, a governance architecture for continuous, autonomous AI observability and zero-trust compliance. AI Trust OS reconceptualizes compliance as an always-on, telemetry-driven operating layer in which AI systems are discovered through observability signals, control assertions are collected by automated probes, and trust artifacts are synthesized continuously. The framework rests on four principles: proactive discovery, telemetry evidence over manual attestation, continuous posture over point-in-time audit, and architecture-backed proof over policy-document trust. The framework operates through a zero-trust telemetry boundary in which ephemeral read-only probes validate structural metadata without ingressing source code or payload-level PII. An AI Observability Extractor Agent scans LangSmith and Datadog LLM telemetry, automatically registering undocumented AI systems and shifting governance from organizational self-report to empirical machine observation. Evaluated across ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA, the paper argues that telemetry-first AI governance represents a categorical architectural shift in how enterprise trust is produced and demonstrated.
Apr 3, 2026

Corporations Constitute Intelligence

In January 2026, Anthropic published a 79-page "constitution" for its AI model Claude, the most comprehensive corporate AI governance document ever released. This Article offers the first legal and democratic-theoretic analysis of that document. Despite genuine philosophical sophistication, the constitution harbors two structural defects. First, it excludes the contexts where ethical constraints matter most: models deployed to the U.S. military operate under different rules, a gap exposed when Claude remained embedded in Palantir's Maven platform during military strikes in Iran even after a government-wide ban on Anthropic's technology. Second, its very comprehensiveness forecloses democratic contestation by resolving questions about AI values, moral status, and conscientious objection that should remain open for public deliberation. Anthropic's own 2023 experiment in participatory constitution-making found roughly 50% divergence between publicly sourced and corporate-authored principles, with the democratic version producing lower bias across nine social dimensions, yet the 2026 constitution incorporates none of those findings. I argue that AI governance suffers from a "political community deficit": the absence of any democratic body authorized to determine the principles governing AI behavior. Corporate transparency, however admirable, is not democratic legitimacy.
Apr 2, 2026

SEAL: An Open, Auditable, and Fair Data Generation Framework for AI-Native 6G Networks

AI-native 6G networks promise to transform the telecom industry by enabling dynamic resource allocation, predictive maintenance, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications across all layers, which are essential for applications such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and immersive XR. However, the deployment of 6G systems results in severe data scarcity, hindering the training of efficient AI models. Synthetic data generation is extensively used to fill this gap; however, it introduces challenges related to dataset bias, auditability, and compliance with regulatory frameworks. In this regard, we propose the Synthetic Data Generation with Ethics Audit Loop (SEAL) framework, which extends baseline modular pipelines with an Ethical and Regulatory Compliance by Design (ERCD) module and a Federated Learning (FL) feedback system. The ERCD integrates fairness, bias detection, and standardized audit trails for regulatory mapping, while the FL enables privacy-preserving calibration using aggregated insights from real testbeds to close the reality-simulation gap. Results show that the SEAL framework outperforms existing methods in terms of Frechet Inception Distance, equalized odds, and accuracy. These results validate the framework's ability to generate auditable and bias-mitigated synthetic data for responsible AI-native 6G development.
Apr 2, 2026

Scale over Preference: The Impact of AI-Generated Content on Online Content Ecology

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) is fundamentally restructuring online content ecologies, necessitating a rigorous examination of its behavioral and distributional implications. Leveraging a comprehensive longitudinal dataset comprising tens of millions of users from a leading Chinese video-sharing platform, this study elucidated the distinct creation and consumption behaviors characterizing AIGC versus Human-Generated Content (HGC). We identified a prevalent scale-over-preference dynamic, wherein AIGC creators achieve aggregate engagement comparable to HGC creators through high-volume production, despite a marked consumer preference for HGC. Deeper analysis uncovered the ability of the algorithmic content distribution mechanism in moderating these competing interests regarding AIGC. These findings advocated for the implementation of AIGC-sensitive distribution algorithms and precise governance frameworks to ensure the long-term health of the online content platforms.
Apr 2, 2026

Ontology-Aware Design Patterns for Clinical AI Systems: Translating Reification Theory into Software Architecture

Clinical AI systems routinely train on health data structurally distorted by documentation workflows, billing incentives, and terminology fragmentation. Prior work has characterised the mechanisms of this distortion: the three-forces model of documentary enactment, the reification feedback loop through which AI may amplify coding artefacts, and terminology governance failures that allow semantic drift to accumulate. Yet translating these insights into implementable software architecture remains an open problem. This paper proposes seven ontology-aware design patterns in Gang-of-Four pattern language for building clinical AI pipelines resilient to ontological distortion. The patterns address data ingestion validation (Ontological Checkpoint), low-frequency signal preservation (Dormancy-Aware Pipeline), continuous drift monitoring (Drift Sentinel), parallel representation maintenance (Dual-Ontology Layer), feedback loop interruption (Reification Circuit Breaker), terminology evolution management (Terminology Version Gate), and pluggable regulatory compliance (Regulatory Compliance Adapter). Each pattern is specified with Problem, Forces, Solution, Consequences, Known Uses, and Related Patterns. We illustrate their composition in a reference architecture for a primary care AI system and provide a walkthrough tracing all seven patterns through a diabetes risk prediction scenario. This paper does not report empirical validation; it offers a design vocabulary grounded in theoretical analysis, subject to future evaluation in production systems. Three patterns have partial precedent in existing systems; the remaining four have not been formally described. Limitations include the absence of runtime benchmarks and restriction to the German and EU regulatory context.
Mar 31, 2026

Beyond Symbolic Control: Societal Consequences of AI-Driven Workforce Displacement and the Imperative for Genuine Human Oversight Architectures

The accelerating displacement of human labor by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic systems represents a structural transformation whose societal consequences extend far beyond conventional labor market analysis. This paper presents a systematic multi-domain examination of the likely effects on economic structure, psychological well-being, political stability, education, healthcare, and geopolitical order. We identify a critical and underexamined dimension of this transition: the governance gap between nominal human oversight of AI systems -- where humans occupy positions of formal authority over AI decisions -- and genuine human oversight, where those humans possess the cognitive access, technical capability, and institutional authority to meaningfully understand, evaluate, and override AI outputs. We argue that this distinction, largely absent from current governance frameworks including the EU AI Act and NIST AI Risk Management Framework 1.0, represents the primary architectural failure mode in deployed AI governance. The societal consequences of labor displacement intensify this problem by concentrating consequential AI decision-making among an increasingly narrow class of technical and capital actors. We propose five architectural requirements for genuine human oversight systems and characterize the governance window -- estimated at 10-15 years -- before current deployment trajectories risk path-dependent social, economic, and institutional lock-in.
Mar 30, 2026

RAD-AI: Rethinking Architecture Documentation for AI-Augmented Ecosystems

AI-augmented ecosystems (interconnected systems where multiple AI components interact through shared data and infrastructure) are becoming the architectural norm for smart cities, autonomous fleets, and intelligent platforms. Yet the architecture documentation frameworks practitioners rely on, arc42 and the C4 model, were designed for deterministic software and cannot capture probabilistic behavior, data-dependent evolution, or dual ML/software lifecycles. This gap carries regulatory consequence: the EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) mandates technical documentation through Annex IV that no existing framework provides structured support for, with enforcement for high-risk systems beginning August 2, 2026. We present RAD-AI, a backward-compatible extension framework that augments arc42 with eight AI-specific sections and C4 with three diagram extensions, complemented by a systematic EU AI Act Annex IV compliance mapping. A regulatory coverage assessment with six experienced software-architecture practitioners provides preliminary evidence that RAD-AI increases Annex IV addressability from approximately 36% to 93% (mean rating) and demonstrates substantial improvement over existing frameworks. Comparative analysis on two production AI platforms (Uber Michelangelo, Netflix Metaflow) captures eight additional AI-specific concerns missed by standard frameworks and demonstrates that documentation deficiencies are structural rather than domain-specific. An illustrative smart mobility ecosystem case study reveals ecosystem-level concerns, including cascading drift and differentiated compliance obligations, that are invisible under standard notation.
Mar 29, 2026

Incentives, Equilibria, and the Limits of Healthcare AI: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Using a stylised coordination problem drawn from inpatient capacity management, three archetypal forms of AI deployment are described: effort-reducing technologies, observability-oriented systems, and interventions that alter underlying incentive structures. Effort reduction and observability may improve performance within existing patterns of behaviour but do not, in general, change which actions are individually rational. As a result, such interventions are typically absorbed into existing equilibria. By contrast, interventions that modify how local actions map to downstream consequences by redistributing or bounding local risk can change stable system behaviour. These mechanism-level interventions differ not in technical sophistication but in their interaction with institutional incentives. The analysis suggests that expectations of system-level gains from AI should be conditioned on whether a deployment changes incentives rather than optimising tasks or information flows alone. For healthcare organisations and policymakers, this has practical implications for procurement, governance, and evaluation of digital technologies.
Mar 27, 2026

Multi-Level Barriers to Generative AI Adoption Across Disciplines and Professional Roles in Higher Education

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping higher education, yet barriers to its adoption across different disciplines and institutional roles remain underexplored. Existing literature frequently attributes adoption barriers to individual-level factors such as perceived usefulness and ease of use. This study instead investigates whether such barriers are structurally produced. Drawing on a multi-method survey analysis of 272 academic and professional services (PSs) staff at a Russell Group university, we examine how disciplinary contexts and institutional roles shape perceived barriers. By integrating multinomial logistic regression (MLR), structural equation modelling (SEM), and semantic clustering of open-ended responses, we move beyond descriptive accounts to provide a multi-level explanation of GenAI adoption. Our findings reveal clear, systematic differences: non-STEM academics primarily report ethical and cultural barriers related to academic integrity, whereas STEM and PSs staff disproportionately emphasize institutional, governance, and infrastructure constraints. We conclude that GenAI adoption barriers are deeply embedded in organizational ecosystems and epistemic norms, suggesting that universities must move beyond generalized training to develop role-specific governance and support frameworks.
Mar 27, 2026

Transparency as Architecture: Structural Compliance Gaps in EU AI Act Article 50 II

Art. 50 II of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act mandates dual transparency for AI-generated content: outputs must be labeled in both human-understandable and machine-readable form for automated verification. This requirement, entering into force in August 2026, collides with fundamental constraints of current generative AI systems. Using synthetic data generation and automated fact-checking as diagnostic use cases, we show that compliance cannot be reduced to post-hoc labeling. In fact-checking pipelines, provenance tracking is not feasible under iterative editorial workflows and non-deterministic LLM outputs; moreover, the assistive-function exemption does not apply, as such systems actively assign truth values rather than supporting editorial presentation. In synthetic data generation, persistent dual-mode marking is paradoxical: watermarks surviving human inspection risk being learned as spurious features during training, while marks suited for machine verification are fragile under standard data processing. Across both domains, three structural gaps obstruct compliance: (a) absent cross-platform marking formats for interleaved human-AI outputs; (b) misalignment between the regulation's 'reliability' criterion and probabilistic model behavior; and (c) missing guidance for adapting disclosures to heterogeneous user expertise. Closing these gaps requires transparency to be treated as an architectural design requirement, demanding interdisciplinary research across legal semantics, AI engineering, and human-centered desi
Mar 27, 2026

A federated architecture for sector-led AI governance: lessons from India

Purpose: India has adopted a vertical, sector-led AI governance strategy. While promoting innovation, such a light-touch approach risks policy fragmentation. This paper aims to propose a cohesive "whole-of-government" architecture to mitigate these risks and connect policy goals with a practical implementation plan. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies an established five-layer conceptual framework to the Indian context. First, it constructs a national architecture for overall governance. Second, it uses a detailed case study on AI incident management to validate and demonstrate the architecture's practical utility in designing a specific, operational system. Findings: The paper develops two actionable architectures. The primary model assigns clear governance roles to India's key institutions. The second is a detailed, federated architecture for national AI Incident Management. It addresses the data silo problem by using a common national standard that allows sector-specific data collection while facilitating cross-sectoral analysis. Practical implications: The proposed architectures offer a clear and predictable roadmap for India's policymakers, regulators and industry to accelerate the national AI governance agenda. Social implications: By providing a systematic path from policy to practice, the architecture builds public trust. This structured approach ensures accountability and aligns AI development with societal values. Originality/value: This paper proposes a detailed operational architecture for India's "whole-of-government" approach to AI. It offers a globally relevant template for any nation pursuing a sector-led governance model, providing a clear implementation plan. Furthermore, the proposed federated architecture demonstrates how adopting common standards can enable cross-border data aggregation and global sectoral risk analysis without centralising control.
Mar 26, 2026

Preserving Decision Sovereignty in Military AI: A Trade-Secret-Safe Architectural Framework for Model Replaceability, Human Authority, and State Control

Recent events surrounding the relationship between frontier AI suppliers and national-security customers have made a structural problem newly visible: once a privately governed model becomes embedded in military workflows, the supplier can influence not only technical performance but also the operational boundary conditions under which the system may be used. This paper argues that the central strategic issue is not merely access to capable models, but preservation of decision sovereignty: the state's ability to retain authority over decision policy, version control, fallback behavior, auditability, and final action approval even when analytical modules are sourced from commercial vendors. Using the public Anthropic--Pentagon dispute of 2026, the broader history of Project Maven, and recent U.S., NATO, U.K., and intelligence-community guidance as a motivating context, the paper develops a trade-secret-safe architectural formulation of the Energetic Paradigm as a layered, model-agnostic command-support design. In this formulation, supplier models remain replaceable analytical components, while routing, constraints, logging, escalation, and action authorization remain state-owned functions. The paper contributes three things: a definition of decision sovereignty for military AI; a threat model for supplier-induced boundary control; and a public architectural specification showing how model replaceability, human authority, and sovereign orchestration can reduce strategic dependency without requiring disclosure of proprietary implementation details. The argument is conceptual rather than experimental, but it yields concrete implications for procurement, governance, and alliance interoperability.
Mar 25, 2026

Trust or Check? Understanding the (Evolutionary) Dynamics of User Trust in AI Systems

As the capabilities and adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems grow, trust in these AI systems is an increasingly urgent concern. Much research has focused on models of AI governance and has primarily examined incentives for safe development and effective regulation. Hence they typically represented users trust as a one-shot adoption choice rather than as a dynamic, evolving process shaped by repeated interactions. We instead model trust as the dynamic choice of reduced monitoring in a repeated, asymmetric interaction between users and AI developers, where checking developers' behaviour is costly. Using evolutionary game theory, we study how users' strategies of trust and developers' strategies of providing safe (compliant) or unsafe (non-compliant) AI co-evolve under different levels of monitoring cost and institutional regimes. We conduct the analysis on both imitation-based and learning-based perspectives, with the stochastic finite-population dynamics, the infinite-population replicator analysis and the reinforcement learning analysis. We find three robust long-run regimes: no adoption by users while developers provide unsafe AI, unsafe but widely adopted systems, and safe systems that are widely adopted. Only the last is desirable, and it arises when penalties for unsafe behaviour exceed the extra cost of safety and users can still afford to monitor at least occasionally. Our results formally support governance proposals that emphasise transparency, low-cost monitoring, and meaningful sanctions, and they show that neither regulation alone nor blind user trust is sufficient to prevent the drift towards unsafe or low-adoption outcomes.
Mar 25, 2026

Retrieval Improvements Do Not Guarantee Better Answers: A Study of RAG for AI Policy QA

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are increasingly used to analyze complex policy documents, but achieving sufficient reliability for expert usage remains challenging in domains characterized by dense legal language and evolving, overlapping regulatory frameworks. We study the application of RAG to AI governance and policy analysis using the AI Governance and Regulatory Archive (AGORA) corpus, a curated collection of 947 AI policy documents. Our system combines a ColBERT-based retriever fine-tuned with contrastive learning and a generator aligned to human preferences using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We construct synthetic queries and collect pairwise preferences to adapt the system to the policy domain. Through experiments evaluating retrieval quality, answer relevance, and faithfulness, we find that domain-specific fine-tuning improves retrieval metrics but does not consistently improve end-to-end question answering performance. In some cases, stronger retrieval counterintuitively leads to more confident hallucinations when relevant documents are absent from the corpus. These results highlight a key concern for those building policy-focused RAG systems: improvements to individual components do not necessarily translate to more reliable answers. Our findings provide practical insights for designing grounded question-answering systems over dynamic regulatory corpora.
Mar 24, 2026

Algorithmic Administration and the EU AI Act: Legal Principles for Public Sector Use of AI

The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) by public authorities introduces both opportunities for innovation and significant challenges for the administrative rule of law. This article examines how the EU AI Act interacts with the fundamental principles of administrative law, with a particular focus on administrative discretion, the duty to state reasons, and proportionality. It analyses the regulatory obligations imposed by the AI Act on public sector deployers of high-risk systems, especially in sensitive domains such as social benefits, migration, education, and law enforcement. It also explores whether the AI Act adequately ensures accountability, transparency, and reviewability in automated public decision-making. The article further considers how the AI Act's risk-based approach aligns (or fails to align) with the principle of proportionality and it proposes safeguards and interpretative strategies to ensure the ethical and lawful deployment of AI in the public sector.
Mar 24, 2026

The EU AI Act and the Rights-based Approach to Technological Governance

The EU AI Act constitutes an important development in shaping the Union's digital regulatory architecture. The Act places fundamental rights at the heart of a risk-based governance framework. The article examines how the AI Act institutionalises a human-centric approach to AI and how the AI Act's provisions explicitly and implicitly embed the protection of rights enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It argues that fundamental rights function not merely as aspirational goals, but as legal thresholds and procedural triggers across the lifecycle of an AI system. The analysis suggests that the AI Act has the potential to serve as a model for rights-preserving AI systems, while acknowledging that challenges will emerge at the level of implementation.
Mar 24, 2026

From the AI Act to a European AI Agency: Completing the Union's Regulatory Architecture

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies continue to advance, effective risk assessment, regulation, and oversight are necessary to ensure that AI development and deployment align with ethical principles while preserving innovation and economic competitiveness. The adoption of the EU AI Act marks an important step in this direction, establishing a harmonised legal framework that includes detailed provisions on AI governance, as well as the creation of the European AI Office. This paper revisits the question of whether a more robust supranational agency dedicated to AI is still warranted and explores how such a body could enhance policy coherence, improve risk assessment capacities, and foster international cooperation. It also argues that a strengthened EU-level agency would also serve the Union's strategic aim of securing digital and technological sovereignty.
Mar 23, 2026

Do Consumers Accept AIs as Moral Compliance Agents?

Consumers are generally resistant to Artificial Intelligence (AI) involvement in moral decision-making, perceiving moral agency as requiring uniquely human traits. This research investigates whether consumers might instead accept AIs in the role of moral compliance, where AI upholds pre-existing moral norms without exercising subjective discretion. Across five studies this research shows that consumers evaluate AI more positively than human agents in moral compliance roles. The findings reveal that this preference arises from inferences of AI's lack of ulterior motives, which are often attributed to human agents. While previous studies have focused on AI as a decision-maker, this work demonstrates the critical role of upholding pre-existing rules, a role in which AI is perceived to excel. These findings contribute to understanding consumer acceptance of moral AI and provide actionable insights for organizations seeking to leverage AI in ethical oversight. By positioning AI as a moral compliance agent, companies can address consumer skepticism, enhance trust, and improve perceptions of corporate ethicality.
Mar 23, 2026

From experimentation to engagement: on the paradox of participatory AI and power in contexts of forced displacement and humanitarian crises

Across the Global North, calls for participatory artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the responsible, safe, and ethical use of AI have increased, particularly efforts that engage citizens and communities whose well-being and safety may be directly impacted by AI and other algorithmic tools. These initiatives include surveys, community consultations, citizens' councils and assemblies, and co-designing AI models and projects. Far fewer efforts, however, have been made in the Global South, particularly in contexts related to humanitarian crises and forced displacement, where the deployment of AI and algorithmic tools is accelerating. In this paper, we critically examine participatory AI methods and their limitations in these contexts and explore the opinions and perceptions of AI held by displaced and crisis-affected communities. Based on a pilot exercise with communities living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya, we find important limitations in some participatory AI approaches which, if used in humanitarian contexts, could increase risks of so-called 'participation washing' and algorithmic harm. We argue that these risks are not predominantly driven by varying levels of understanding and awareness of AI but more closely linked to the fundamental power dynamics embedded within the humanitarian sector: between humanitarian aid recipients, service providers, donor governments, and host nations, as well as the power differentials and incentives that exist between AI companies and humanitarian actors. These structural conditions make the case not only for more rigorous participatory methods, but for independent governance architecture capable of holding humanitarian AI to account.
Mar 22, 2026

Behavioural feasible set: Value alignment constraints on AI decision support

When organisations adopt commercial AI systems for decision support, they inherit value judgements embedded by vendors that are neither transparent nor renegotiable. The governance puzzle is not whether AI can support decisions but which recommendations the system can actually produce given how its vendor has configured it. I formalise this as a behavioural feasible set, the range of recommendations reachable under vendor-imposed alignment constraints, and characterise diagnostic thresholds for when organisational requirements exceed the system's flexibility. In scenario-based experiments using binary decision scenarios and multi-stakeholder ranking tasks, I show that alignment materially compresses this set. Comparing pre- and post-alignment variants of an open-weight model isolates the mechanism: alignment makes the system substantially less able to shift its recommendation even under legitimate contextual pressure. Leading commercial models exhibit comparable or greater rigidity. In multi-stakeholder tasks, alignment shifts implied stakeholder priorities rather than neutralising them, meaning organisations adopt embedded value orientations set upstream by the vendor. Organisations thus face a governance problem that better prompting cannot resolve: selecting a vendor partially determines which trade-offs remain negotiable and which stakeholder priorities are structurally embedded.
Mar 20, 2026

AEGIS: An Operational Infrastructure for Post-Market Governance of Adaptive Medical AI Under US and EU Regulations

Machine learning systems deployed in medical devices require governance frameworks that ensure safety while enabling continuous improvement. Regulatory bodies including the FDA and European Union have introduced mechanisms such as the Predetermined Change Control Plan (PCCP) and Post-Market Surveillance (PMS) to manage iterative model updates without repeated submissions. This paper presents AI/ML Evaluation and Governance Infrastructure for Safety (AEGIS), a governance framework applicable to any healthcare AI system. AEGIS comprises three modules, i.e., dataset assimilation and retraining, model monitoring, and conditional decision, that operationalize FDA PCCP and EU AI Act Article 43(4) provisions. We implement a four-category deployment decision taxonomy (APPROVE, CONDITIONAL APPROVAL, CLINICAL REVIEW, REJECT) with an independent PMS ALARM signal, enabling detection of the critical state in which no deployable model exists while the released model is simultaneously at risk. To illustrate how AEGIS can be instantiated across heterogeneous clinical contexts, we provide two examples: sepsis prediction from electronic health records and brain tumor segmentation from medical imaging. Both cases use identical governance architecture, differing only in configuration. Across 11 simulated iterations on the sepsis example, AEGIS yielded 8 APPROVE, 1 CONDITIONAL APPROVAL, 1 CLINICAL REVIEW, and 1 REJECT decision, exercising all four categories. ALARM signals were co-issued at iterations 8 and 10, including the critical state where no deployable model exists and the released model is simultaneously failing. AEGIS detected drift before observable performance degradation. These results demonstrate that AEGIS translates regulatory change-control concepts into executable governance procedures, supporting safe continuous learning for adaptive medical AI across diverse clinical applications.
Mar 19, 2026

Security, privacy, and agentic AI in a regulatory view: From definitions and distinctions to provisions and reflections

The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has led to a dynamic regulatory landscape, where legislative frameworks strive to keep pace with technical advancements. As AI paradigms shift towards greater autonomy, specifically in the form of agentic AI, it becomes increasingly challenging to precisely articulate regulatory stipulations. This challenge is even more acute in the domains of security and privacy, where the capabilities of autonomous agents often blur traditional legal and technical boundaries. This paper reviews the evolving European Union (EU) AI regulatory provisions via analyzing 24 relevant documents published between 2024 and 2025. From this review, we provide a clarification of critical definitions. We deconstruct the regulatory interpretations of security, privacy, and agentic AI, distinguishing them from closely related concepts to resolve ambiguity. We synthesize the reviewed documents to articulate the current state of regulatory provisions targeting different types of AI, particularly those related to security and privacy aspects. We analyze and reflect on the existing provisions in the regulatory dimension to better align security and privacy obligations with AI and agentic behaviors. These insights serve to inform policymakers, developers, and researchers on the compliance and AI governance in the society with increasing algorithmic agencies.