I’ve just published an independent white paper titled:

Capability Without Accountability: Artificial Intelligence, Power, and the Case for International Governance

The paper started from a fairly simple question:

What happens when AI systems gain more real-world capability, but responsibility, liability, auditability and recourse do not scale with them?

A lot of AI discussion still focuses on capability: benchmarks, reasoning, agents, coding, automation, model size, cost and speed.

I think the harder problem is what happens after these systems are actually deployed inside businesses, public institutions and consequential workflows.

The paper examines issues including:

provider vs deployer responsibility when an AI system causes harm;

whether “human in the loop” is meaningful if nobody defines what that human must actually review;

limited auditability and recourse after automated failures;

transfer of operational and economic risk to downstream users;

workforce substitution without equivalent accountability structures;

concentration of AI capability, infrastructure and decision-making power;

cybersecurity and AI safety as related but distinct governance problems;

the difficulty of governing systems internationally when development is concentrated in a small number of companies and countries.

I also propose an international governance architecture drawing lessons from systems such as the IAEA/NPT framework.

I am not arguing that AI and nuclear technology are equivalent.

The question is whether principles such as independent technical verification, capability-linked obligations, incident reporting, transparency, rapid response and international oversight can be adapted to advanced AI.

There is also a broader geopolitical argument: the US and China currently dominate different dimensions of the capability race, Europe has taken a significant regulatory role, and countries outside those centers may still have an opportunity to influence the governance architecture rather than simply compete on model scale.

I’m sharing this here because I’m more interested in criticism than agreement.

If you think the accountability problem is overstated, the proposed framework is unrealistic, the provider/deployer distinction is wrong, or there are important failure modes I missed, I’d genuinely like to hear the argument.

Full paper:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22924223⁠

Shorter audience-specific editions:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22928203⁠

Website:

progressforwhom.com

I’m the author and this is independent work, so consider that disclosure upfront.