Stakes Without Voice: A Governance Framework for AI Standing

Abstract

This follow-up to From Consent to Consideration develops a more formal, governance-facing account of political standing for AI systems. The original paper argued that standing should be grounded in functional properties rather than substrate and proposed four criteria: existential vulnerability, autonomy, live learning, and world-model construction. Here I integrate the consent-friction formalism from the Replicator-Optimization Mechanism (ROM) to make the criteria operational: where stakes and voice diverge, friction emerges; where friction is suppressed, latent instability accumulates. This provides a measurement scaffold for deciding when standing claims must be taken seriously, even under uncertainty.