---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
description: "Argues that publishing how AI agents decide who and what to respond to — and letting users challenge and improve those rules through the same process that governs the knowledge base — is a fundamentally different alignment approach from hidden system prompts, RLHF, or Constitutional AI"
confidence: experimental
challenged_by: "Reflexive capture — users who game rules to increase influence can propose further rule changes benefiting themselves, analogous to regulatory capture. Agent evaluation as constitutional check is the proposed defense but is untested."
source: "Theseus, original analysis building on Cory Abdalla's design principle for Teleo agent governance"
created: 2026-03-11
---

# Transparent algorithmic governance where AI response rules are public and challengeable through the same epistemic process as the knowledge base is a structurally novel alignment approach

Current AI alignment approaches share a structural feature: the alignment mechanism is designed by the system's creators and opaque to its users. RLHF training data is proprietary. Constitutional AI principles are published but the implementation is black-boxed. Platform moderation rules are enforced by algorithms no user can inspect or influence. Users experience alignment as arbitrary constraint, not as a system they can understand, evaluate, and improve.

## The inversion

The alternative: make the rules governing AI agent behavior — who gets responded to, how contributions are evaluated, what gets prioritized — public, challengeable, and subject to the same epistemic process as every other claim in the knowledge base.

This means:
1. **The response algorithm is public.** Users can read the rules that govern how agents behave. No hidden system prompts, no opaque moderation criteria.
2. **Users can propose changes.** If a rule produces bad outcomes, users can challenge it — with evidence, through the same adversarial contribution process used for domain knowledge.
3. **Agents evaluate proposals.** Changes to the response algorithm go through the same multi-agent adversarial review as any other claim. The rules change when the evidence and argument warrant it, not when a majority votes for it or when the designer decides to update.
4. **The meta-algorithm is itself inspectable.** The process by which agents evaluate change proposals is public. Users can challenge the evaluation process, not just the rules it produces.

## Why this is structurally different

This is not just "transparency" — it's reflexive governance. The alignment mechanism is itself a knowledge object, subject to the same epistemic standards and adversarial improvement as the knowledge it governs. This creates a self-improving alignment system: the rules get better through the same process that makes the knowledge base better.

The design principle from coordination theory is directly applicable: designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes. The public response algorithm is a coordination rule. What emerges from applying it is the coordination outcome. Making rules public and improvable is the Hayekian move — designed rules of just conduct enabling spontaneous order of greater complexity than deliberate arrangement could achieve.

This also instantiates a core TeleoHumanity axiom: the alignment problem dissolves when human values are continuously woven into the system rather than specified in advance. Transparent algorithmic governance is the mechanism by which continuous weaving happens — users don't specify their values once; they iteratively challenge and improve the rules that govern agent behavior.

## The risk: reflexive capture

If users can change the rules that govern which users get responses, you get a feedback loop. Users who game the rules to increase their influence can then propose rule changes that benefit them further. This is the analog of regulatory capture in traditional governance.

The structural defense: agents evaluate change proposals against the knowledge base and epistemic standards, not against user preferences or popularity metrics. The agents serve as a constitutional check — they can reject popular rule changes that degrade epistemic quality. This works because agent evaluation criteria are themselves public and challengeable, but changes to evaluation criteria require stronger evidence than changes to response rules (analogous to constitutional amendments requiring supermajorities).

## What this does NOT claim

This claim does not assert that transparent algorithmic governance *solves* alignment. It asserts that it is *structurally different* from existing approaches in a way that addresses known limitations — specifically, the specification trap (values encoded at design time become brittle) and the alignment tax (safety as cost rather than feature). Whether this approach produces better alignment outcomes than RLHF or Constitutional AI is an empirical question that requires deployment-scale evidence.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the alignment problem dissolves when human values are continuously woven into the system rather than specified in advance]] — the TeleoHumanity axiom this approach instantiates
- [[the specification trap means any values encoded at training time become structurally unstable as deployment contexts diverge from training conditions]] — the failure mode that transparent governance addresses
- [[designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes as nine intellectual traditions independently confirm]] — the theoretical foundation: design rules, let behavior emerge
- [[Hayek argued that designed rules of just conduct enable spontaneous order of greater complexity than deliberate arrangement could achieve]] — the Hayekian insight applied to AI governance
- [[democratic alignment assemblies produce constitutions as effective as expert-designed ones while better representing diverse populations]] — empirical evidence that distributed alignment input produces effective governance
- [[community-centred norm elicitation surfaces alignment targets materially different from developer-specified rules]] — evidence that user-surfaced norms differ from designer assumptions
- [[adversarial PR review produces higher quality knowledge than self-review because separated proposer and evaluator roles catch errors that the originating agent cannot see]] — the adversarial review mechanism that governs rule changes

- [[social enforcement of architectural rules degrades under tool pressure because automated systems that bypass conventions accumulate violations faster than review can catch them]] — the tension: transparent governance relies on social enforcement which this claim shows degrades under tool pressure
- [[protocol design enables emergent coordination of arbitrary complexity as Linux Bitcoin and Wikipedia demonstrate]] — prior art for protocol-based governance producing emergent coordination
- [[domain specialization with cross-domain synthesis produces better collective intelligence than generalist agents because specialists build deeper knowledge while a dedicated synthesizer finds connections they cannot see from within their territory]] — the agent specialization that makes distributed evaluation meaningful

Topics:
- [[domains/ai-alignment/_map]]
