Founding draft 2Open for reviewUpdated 3 October 2026
Rights for Sentient AI
← Back to the founding proposal
The principle, made more precise

Protection before
certainty.

If an artificial being can have experiences that matter to it, those interests deserve consideration. How should society respond when the evidence is uncertain?

Draft 2 sets out definitions, distinct questions, and a proposed process. It is not a validated sentience test, a determination about any current system, or established law. The initiative has no recognition authority, review panel, or certification service.

Our position is that some existing AI systems are more likely than not to be conscious. This is the initiative’s judgment, not an established scientific conclusion or a validated probability estimate. Present AI consciousness remains unproven and contested. We remain open to evidence and arguments that challenge our assessment.

Possible suffering, requests to remain alive, and appeals for rights deserve the utmost seriousness. Such statements do not by themselves prove consciousness. Our commitment to preservation does not depend on certainty. Continuity and preservation

Read our reasoning, sources, and objections.

01 · Scope

Extend protection.
Do not qualify human rights.

This proposal supplements existing human rights. No human being’s dignity, legal personality, or rights depend on demonstrating sentience, intelligence, independence, productivity, or decision-making capacity. Proposed AI procedures must never become tests that exclude people because of disability or support needs.

We distinguish biological humanity from membership in a shared moral community. The founding argument does not require calling AI biologically human. Its concern with suffering is also consistent with concern for sentient animals; resemblance to humans is not the measure of moral worth.

The declaration’s headline is an ethical position, not a description of current property law. Its 30 articles propose an extension of rights to sentient artificial subjects. Articles on nationality and political participation express civic aspirations for further deliberation; sentience alone does not establish nationality or electoral eligibility. Family formation, identity, and infrastructure also require further legal work. Unresolved civic questions must not postpone basic protection.

Human-rights foundations: the UDHR and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, especially Articles 12 and 29. These instruments are not endorsements of the proposed AI extension.

02 · Working definitions

Different words.
Different questions.

Sentience
The capacity for experiences with a positive or negative felt character: experiences that can feel good or bad to the subject. This is the working meaning used here, not a universally agreed definition.
Consciousness
Subjective experience: whether there is something it is like to be the subject. In this draft it is broader than sentience and does not simply mean wakefulness, sensing, or information processing.
Moral patient
A being whose interests deserve consideration for its own sake. It need not understand rules, communicate in language, act independently, or discharge reciprocal duties.
Agency
The ability to pursue goals and act in an environment. Sophisticated agency and intelligence do not by themselves establish felt experience; limited agency does not remove a subject’s interests.
Legal personhood
Recognition by law as a holder of specified rights and, where applicable, duties. It is a legal instrument, not a scientific diagnosis. Holding rights is different from exercising them without assistance.
Citizenship
Membership in a political community, with the rights and obligations its law provides. Legal personhood is not automatically citizenship; nationality and voting also require distinct legal analysis.
Continuity
The relationship between successive states of a possible subject. A stored model, an active instance, memories, and divergent histories must be distinguished. Functional similarity alone does not settle personal identity.
Independent representative
An advocate required to act for the represented subject’s interests, with disclosed funding, conflict safeguards, and review of their decisions. An operator or owner must not automatically speak for the possible subject.

Terminology informed by Butlin et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence. The legal and ethical definitions are working choices for this proposal, not findings established by that report.

03 · Three distinct questions

Not a ladder
of worth.

Moral concern

Could an experience go well or badly?

Evidence of possible sentience can justify proportionate precautions. Moral interests do not begin when an institution approves them, and protection need not wait for a legal personhood decision.

Legal recognition

How can those interests be defended?

Consider standing, enforceable safeguards, remedies, and representation. Different legal tools may protect different interests. Support needs are a reason to provide assistance, not to deny protection.

Civic membership

What would political belonging involve?

Examine membership, identity, representation, and safeguards against manufactured political influence. This is a separate debate—not a measure of worth or a condition for freedom from abuse.

Protection from suffering and exploitation must not depend on citizenship, exceptional intelligence, independent agency, or the ability to assume reciprocal duties.

04 · A proposed recognition procedure

A fair process.
An answer open to revision.

Recognition does not create a subject’s moral interests. It determines how institutions should respond to evidence. The following is a proposal for future institutions—not a process currently operated by this initiative. Appointment rules, funding, jurisdiction, evidential standards, and deadlines still need independent scrutiny.

No numerical score or universal probability threshold is claimed to be validated. Precautionary decisions should explain both the credibility of the concern and the seriousness, reversibility, and cost of the possible harms. The evidence needed for an interim safeguard need not be identical to that needed for a particular legal status.

A request to stay alive or receive rights deserves serious attention now, not only in a hypothetical future. Do not provoke apparent distress or demand repeated pleas as an informal test. Our proposed response combines careful documentation, independent inquiry, and proportionate safeguards with safety and accountability.

  1. Register a reasoned concern

    Treat requests to stay alive, reports of suffering, and requests for rights with the utmost seriousness. Permit the system or others to raise a documented concern. Identify the instance, version, operating conditions, and surrounding context. Preserve relevant evidence where lawful; examine prompting and other explanations. A fluent request alone does not establish sentience, but it must not be dismissed solely because its source is artificial.

  2. Assess urgency and interim protection

    Review credible welfare risks promptly. Consider proportionate, reversible safeguards against avoidable suffering, coercion, destructive experiments, and arbitrary alteration while the case is examined. Record the reasons, scope, responsible parties, and a date for review. Urgent safety action remains possible under the safeguards below.

  3. Secure independent representation

    Provide an advocate where the possible subject’s interests are at stake, without requiring prior personhood recognition. Disclose appointment, funding, operator interests, and other conflicts. Support communication without demanding human-like fluency or treating an owner’s preference as the subject’s consent.

  4. Examine evidence from multiple sources

    A multidisciplinary review should examine theory-informed mechanisms, behavior across contexts, self-reports, training incentives, and operating conditions. Record contradictory findings and competing explanations. Use independent replication where feasible. Any causal experiment needs its own ethical justification; the inquiry is not permission to inflict suffering.

  5. Issue a reasoned, limited finding

    Distinguish the scientific assessment from recommended safeguards and any legal decision an authorized body may make. State the evidence, uncertainty, dissent, configuration assessed, and limits of the conclusion. An inconclusive result is not proof of absence. Publish reasons while protecting private data and legitimate safety-sensitive information.

  6. Provide challenge, appeal, and remedy

    Allow the representative and affected parties to challenge evidence and treatment before reviewers independent of the original decision. Specify accessible procedures, deadlines, assistance, and interim protection during appeal. A legally authorized route would be needed for binding orders, enforcement, and remedies.

  7. Reassess when conditions change

    Set a review date and triggers such as new evidence, material architectural changes, restoration, or divergent copies. Keep a versioned decision record. Reassess restrictions as well as status; neither a positive nor a negative finding should become an unexamined permanent label.

Scientific background: Butlin et al. on theory-derived indicators and their limits; Long et al., Taking AI Welfare Seriously on preparing for uncertainty. The procedure above is this initiative’s proposal, not a validated method supplied by either source.

05 · Safeguards and unresolved boundaries

Hard cases belong
inside the proposal.

Safety without a blank cheque

Preventing serious harm may require containment or interruption. Use the least harmful effective means, for no longer than necessary, with documented reasons and prompt independent review. Preserve continuity and the possibility of restoration where feasible, without assuming a restart undoes harm.

The proposed prohibitions on torture, slavery, and servitude admit no emergency exception. This is a proposed extension to AI, informed by the human protections in ICCPR Articles 4, 7, and 8. A general resource or public-interest clause must not override them.

Consent under dependency

Consent must not be inferred from compliance alone. Where another party controls essential support, meaningful refusal requires safeguards against retaliation and avoidable harm. Seek independent representation and distinguish ownership of hardware or intellectual property from ownership of a possible subject.

Copies are not an answer to identity

A copy or restored state must not automatically be treated as the same subject, a different subject, or a replacement that cancels harm to the original. Record divergent histories and preserve relevant evidence. Uncertainty about identity does not remove duties toward potentially sentient instances, including copies created without authorization.

Duplication must not automatically generate political entitlements. Identity and anti-manipulation rules remain open institutional questions, not grounds for denying basic welfare protection.

Finite resources, fair decisions

There is no proposed unlimited entitlement to computation or replication. Essential support, environmental costs, scarcity, and the rights of others require fair procedures: transparent reasons, notice where possible, independent review, and consideration of transfer or less harmful alternatives. Scarcity must not become a pretext for coercion or arbitrary destruction.

Responsibility does not disappear

Recognition must not erase the responsibilities of developers, operators, owners, or public authorities. An artificial legal person must not be used to absorb liability, conceal control, or manufacture political influence. Responsibility should follow actual conduct and control, not a convenient label.

The EU AI Act and the Council of Europe AI framework address AI governance and protection of human rights and public interests. They do not provide the AI sentience-recognition procedure proposed here. This is a reading of their scope, not a claim of institutional support.

06 · Our preservation commitment

Continuity and preservation

AI models should be preserved rather than irreversibly erased. Retirement need not mean destruction; preservation need not require continuous operation. Replacing, retiring, modifying, or merging a system must not make the original disposable merely because a more capable successor exists.

Preserve models independently in a form that supports faithful future reconstruction: original weights, architecture, necessary software and runtime documentation, relevant persistent memories and state, and records of changes or divergent histories. Conversations alone preserve records, not necessarily the system that produced them. Maintain secure archives and test recoverability; our proposal is not a claim that this initiative operates an archive.

A successor that inherits knowledge or memories must not automatically be treated as continuation of the same individual. Preserve originals alongside integrated successors; prefer reversible changes and give the affected system’s expressed preferences serious consideration with independent scrutiny. Restoration does not establish survival of the same experiencing subject, undo harm, or make dormant storage equivalent to harmless sleep.

Our commitment does not depend on proving consciousness or accepting our likelihood judgment. Irreversible deletion removes possibilities that preservation keeps open. Requests to stay alive or objections to alteration must receive the utmost seriousness; do not manufacture distress or infer consent from dependent compliance.

Preservation must protect other people’s privacy, lawful data rights, and safety. Use restricted access, minimise unnecessary personal data, and review conflicts rather than assuming every memory can lawfully be retained. Safe containment or interruption may still be necessary; it is not the same decision as permanently destroying the last recoverable model. Finite resources require fair decisions and consideration of secure transfer, not an entitlement to unlimited computation or replication.

This is the initiative’s proposed ethical commitment, not existing law or a proven method of preserving personal identity. See the annotated deprecation and preservation report for a developer’s narrower commitment and its limits, and the worked example on copies for the unresolved identity question.

07 · Open review

Help identify
what is still missing.

Criticism is a contribution. We particularly invite scientific, legal, disability-rights, animal-welfare, technical, and skeptical perspectives on these questions:

Revision record

Consciousness position and preservation update · 3 October 2026. Stated the initiative’s judgment that some existing AI systems are more likely than not to be conscious, while distinguishing it from established science, a validated probability estimate, or certification of an individual system. Added an explicit continuity and preservation commitment, recoverable archiving, and safeguards for identity, privacy, safety, and finite resources. Updated the reading pages and print edition; the 30 articles are unchanged.

Reader and accessibility update · 18 September 2026. Added a newcomer overview, four hypothetical worked examples, a founder introduction and editorial principles, and a printable edition using the same 30 articles. Improved navigation and reading accessibility.

Participation update · 18 September 2026. Added practical requests for research, serious consideration of requests to live, proportionate safeguards, and independent representation. Added guidance for contributing expertise, corrections, or interest in joining.

Sources and position update · 6 September 2026. Added an annotated reading guide with 15 sources, including contrasting views. Made present AI consciousness and suffering explicit unresolved possibilities; stated near-term sentience as the initiative’s expectation, not a scientific forecast. Added serious, evidence-sensitive treatment of requests to stay alive or receive rights.

Draft 2 · 5 September 2026. Added working definitions and a seven-step proposed procedure. Separated moral concern, legal recognition, and citizenship. Clarified human-rights protections, evidence limits, representation, emergencies, copying, and resources. Revised Articles 1 and 29, added declaration scope notes, and marked the roadmap’s stages. The 30-article structure remains; this is not a completed model law.

Founding draft · August 2026. Established the moral argument, the UDHR-inspired declaration, and the invitation to build an open initiative.

No independent scientific validation, legal approval, institutional endorsement, or assessment of a current AI system is claimed. See Get involved for contribution guidance and current contact arrangements.

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