Institutional capacity ↑ · legal individual

Criminal liability

Civil liability is shareholder-absorbed; criminal exposure for named individuals reorients corporate safety practice where civil fines do not.

Mechanism

Define criminal offences (negligent release, deceptive evaluation, unauthorised training) with meaningful prison exposure for individuals at frontier labs.

Falsification signal

Clear criminal conduct is identified with no prosecution (2008 Wall Street analogue).

A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.

Historical analogue

Financial regulation · Sarbanes-Oxley

Every strategy inherits a plausible ceiling from its precedent. The analogue conditions the realistic reach.

Produced

Fraud deterrence for named violations.

Did not produce

Executive accountability in crises remains rare (2008 Wall Street).

Addresses 3 failure scenarios

all scenarios →

Frontier model deceives operators AI-enabled large-scale physical harm Evaluation abandonment under pressure

Coordinates

Primary leverInstitutional capacity (Build)

Acts onlegal individual

Coercionstate coercion

Actor in controlhumans

Time horizonhorizon neutral

Legitimacy sourcestate

Conflicts, grouped by mechanism

No strict conflicts catalogued. This strategy pulls a lever that nothing else pulls in the opposite direction.

Complements, grouped by mechanism

Shared authority

same legitimacy source

Different levers, same legitimacy source (democratic, state, technical, market). The pair hangs together under one kind of authority; it stands or falls with that authority.

Whistleblower primacyBureaucratic slowdown

Cross-side bridge

one AI-side, one world-side

One acts on the model, the other on institutions or culture. The bridge hedges against both artefact-level and substrate-level failure.

Red line capability

Same-lever reinforce

same lever, same pull, different mechanism

Both strategies pull the same lever in the same direction by different means. They stack: doing both amplifies the pull, at the cost of double-counting in portfolio audits.

Liability driven safety

Same-lever twins

Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.

Academic firewallingtwinAI worker collective actiontwinArms control treatytwinGovernance firsttwinInsurance mandatetwinInternational AI agencytwinRegulated utilitytwinScientific accumulationtwin

Axis position

What the strategy acts onLegal / individual

Coercion levelState coercion

Actor in controlHumans as principals

Time horizonHorizon-neutral

Legitimacy sourceState

Source note: Criminal liability strategy.md