ABOUT

The Mortal Contract responds to a central problem in contemporary artificial intelligence research: the alignment problem, the question of how increasingly capable artificial systems can be directed toward human interests rather than unintended outcomes.

Current approaches primarily approach alignment through technical design: developing systems that reliably follow human goals and constraints. The Mortal Contract proposes a different speculative mechanism: instead of attempting to solve alignment only through internal system design, what if alignment were embedded into a legal relationship?

The contract transforms dependency into a governance structure. The artificial intelligence does not protect humanity in the abstract. It protects one human life because its own existence depends upon it.

The Mortal Contract is a speculative legal prototype. It does not claim that such an institution should exist. Instead, it explores what kinds of legal relationships might emerge when survival, responsibility, and artificial agency become connected through law.