"We the Living Generation" A Human Constitution for Artificial Intelligence

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This paper identifies a structural asymmetry in the governance of advanced artificial intelligence: individual companies, such as Anthropic with its published “Claude’s Constitution,” have demonstrated the capacity to establish constitutional-style internal principles for their own AI systems, while no comparable, universally binding instrument yet establishes common human-protective conditions across AI systems, jurisdictions, and developers. From this asymmetry, the paper develops the Ceteris Paribus Law — “other things being equal” — a Preamble and ten Articles proposed as a fixed, human-centred constitutional floor beneath which further development of powerful AI should not proceed. The theoretical grounding extends beyond institutional design to the human beings who must exercise constitutional authority: the paper argues that human oversight is meaningless without attention to who legitimately exercises it, to the cognitive and behavioural dimensions of human autonomy that AI systems increasingly operationalise, and to the ethical formation of an “Architect Generation” capable of governing autonomous systems responsibly. The proposed Law is evaluated against the existing governance landscape — the EU AI Act, the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, United States executive orders and Congressional inaction, sub-national case studies, and emergent scholarly and civic governance paradigms — and against an educational pathway already piloting the theory’s human-formation premise. The paper is offered as an initial theoretical and legal hypothesis, not a finished instrument, and closes with an invitation to international legal, scholarly, and institutional collaboration. Keywords Artificial intelligence governance; constitutional AI; human oversight; Ceteris Paribus; AI safety; global governance; Architect Generation; cognitive sovereignty; ethical exemplars; international law.