The Artificial Labour Commons

Preamble: Why We Propose This

A shared opportunity

Artificial labour could expand what people can achieve, reduce burdensome work, and make a dignified life more widely attainable. ALC offers one possible prescription for turning that potential into durable prosperity. A balanced society, in this proposal, combines productive enterprise, widely shared ownership, dependable provision, meaningful choice, and accountable institutions. It leaves room for different ambitions and ways of life.

ALC asks a great deal of some people, and says so plainly. The largest holders of artificial labour would sell most of their stakes over fifteen years, frontier AI developers would answer to elected councils, and large firms would share the gains of automation with the workers it displaces. These are proposals about future rules, not verdicts on the people and businesses that built today's economy under today's rules. Builders, investors, workers, communities, and public institutions all have contributions to make, and the proposal should be judged on whether it works.

Preserving independence as work changes

People's ability to shape their lives rests on several foundations: rights, productive work, ownership, public services, and institutions that depend on their participation. Work has provided both income and a voice in decisions, while mutual dependence has helped sustain bargaining and accountability. Research on the spread of democracy examines how the need for broad cooperation can support wider political participation (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000). As technology changes these relationships, we can build additional foundations for independence.

As artificial labour, meaning virtual and embodied systems that perform work, becomes more capable, four foundations deserve deliberate support:

• Livelihood. Income and participation can rest on ownership and protected entitlements alongside paid work, so changing demand for labour need not reduce anyone's standing.
• Alternatives. Independent access is easier to sustain when productive capacity and its supporting infrastructure have diverse providers.
• Cooperation. Institutions can preserve meaningful participation and human judgment even when more decisions and operations become automated.
• Accountability. Public voice and independent review can remain strong as sources of income change. Research on resource income and accountability (Ross, 2001), and on possible AI-related disempowerment (Drago and Laine, 2025; Kulveit et al., 2025), motivates examining these relationships without assuming the same outcome everywhere.

Widely accessible automation could strengthen individuals, small organisations, and established enterprises alike. The concern is conditional: broad substitution for human work, concentrated productive ownership, and weak independent institutions could together reduce meaningful choice, even without anyone intending that result. ALC proposes additional foundations for independence so that greater productivity can support both shared prosperity and personal agency.

Income alongside independence

A good income is one foundation of a good life. Others include dependable rights, access to productive tools, privacy, a choice of providers, and a practical way to challenge decisions. The central question is therefore:

How can greater productive capacity give everyone more freedom to live well, create, cooperate, and shape the decisions that affect them?

ALC's answer has two parts. First, four guarantees of standing: an independent livelihood, independent access to productive capacity, effective voice and recourse, and dispersed power (Section III). Second, dispersed ownership: no person may own more than a capped amount of the means of artificial labour, and every person owns a real share of it.

Ownership as a shared foundation

Artificial labour is general-purpose: the same capabilities can support a wide and growing range of work. Its availability depends on shared productive foundations, some of which are costly to reproduce or difficult to substitute. It also draws on a common inheritance of accumulated knowledge and publicly supported science, alongside new investment and invention. These features support a proposal to widen participation in both its returns and its governance.

ALC combines room for initiative, widely distributed ownership, public accountability, and independent safeguards. These ideas need not belong to opposing camps. The proposal keeps companies privately owned, places a ceiling on any one person's holding, and builds a real, personal stake for everyone. Its test is practical: can this combination preserve incentives to build while giving more people lasting independence and a meaningful voice?

Building on existing institutional ideas

ALC brings together familiar tools: private enterprise, diversified ownership, public-interest obligations, independent supervision, and enforceable rights. Appendix B examines partial precedents and their limitations. None establishes that this combination will work; they provide starting points for testing its legal, financial, and practical feasibility.

The wider case

• Ethical. Shared knowledge and new contributions can both be recognised: people who build should have room to succeed, and everyone should have a foundation for a dignified life. Decisions with broad consequences need meaningful participation. Fairness extends across borders, and uncertainty about artificial experience calls for careful welfare safeguards.
• Economic. A productive economy needs investment, experimentation, and ways for people to share in its gains. Research on declining labour shares (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2014), local displacement from automation (Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2020), concentration (Autor et al., 2020), and wealth accumulation (Piketty, 2014) gives reasons to examine broader ownership alongside support for enterprise. These findings do not establish a single inevitable future.
• Institutional. Predictable transitions and effective worker support can help sustain trust as production changes; research links economic displacement with political polarisation (Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Majlesi, 2020). Shared safety commitments can also make cooperation more durable when competitive pressures would otherwise favour speed over caution.

An ownership cap with fair-value settlement

Every compulsory share sale receives fair-value settlement through a transparent and reviewable process, and the seller keeps the proceeds. Settlement may include market-valued notes rather than immediate cash (Section VIII). ALC does not preserve previous wealth or control rights: companies remain privately owned, but frontier councils appoint their leadership and set direction. Investors retain economic returns on holdings below the cap, subject to ordinary business risk. Equal treatment and compensation support the legal case; they do not settle every constitutional or treaty question.

Why now, and why gradually

Planning while choices remain open gives people and enterprises time to adapt, invest, and test institutions before they are needed at scale. ALC therefore proposes a fifteen-year transition: guarantees and oversight at enactment, a People's Trust and elected frontier-AI stewardship within a few years, and cap steps at years 5, 10, and 15. The scheduled cap is linked to phased Dignity Standard milestones, reaching the full standard by year 15. The timetable is published at the outset; confirmed shortfalls reduce the cap and widen coverage under the stated rules. Predictability supports planning, while independent review tests whether the arrangements are serving their purpose.

From reasons to design

Scope of claim: This is a possible path, not a prediction or a guarantee. The pace of automation, its effects on employment and independence, and the possibility of artificial experience remain uncertain. ALC aims to reduce catastrophic risks and support a balanced society; whether its mechanisms can do so requires evidence, financing, legal scrutiny, and public deliberation. Other proposals should be assessed against the same goals.

Executive Summary

Five mechanisms

ALC starts with major providers of artificial labour: producers of virtual and embodied labour, and critical-infrastructure providers supporting that capacity. From year 5, shortfalls extend the cap through broad roles, with strategic capacity first and wider infrastructure second (Section XVII). These are priorities, not fixed sector or market definitions; published designation rules apply equally regardless of nationality. Separately, large firms contribute to worker support and the People's Trust through the Automation Dividend (Section XII).

The path

The settlement

Room to build. A stake for everyone. Independence as work changes.

ALC in nine sentences

1. Standing does not depend on work. Four guarantees protect every person's independence, beginning on enactment.
2. Ownership becomes more widely shared. The cap reaches 1,000 times the reference income over fifteen years, counted through every ownership layer, and tightens when provision falls short.
3. The floor comes first. Every person can claim the Dignity Standard at its milestones; confirmed shortfalls cut the cap and, from year 5, extend it through the published tiers, starting with strategic capacity, then infrastructure.
4. Everyone shares. National People's Trusts build personal ownership stakes and contribute to a worldwide dividend floor.
5. Sales are compensated. Compulsory sales receive fair-value settlement, and sellers keep the proceeds.
6. Frontier AI has accountable stewardship. Elected Stewardship Councils direct the developers of the most capable AI models.
7. Transitions include worker support. Firms contribute through the Automation Dividend, with a public guarantee of entitlements.
8. One rule for everyone. The cap applies equally to citizens and foreigners, and to every provider, whatever its nationality.
9. Safety has independent verification. An independent authority licenses, certifies, and supervises from day one.

This is a proposal for legislation and international cooperation, not a description of powers already in place. Policy numbers, dates, and worked examples are illustrative; Section XVIII lists them in one place. Historical dates and references are factual claims, not proposed parameters.

I. A Shared Design

Governing artificial labour involves two related questions: how should decisions be made, and how should people share in the value created? ALC proposes combining several useful principles, with a distinct role and a clear safeguard for each. The aim is a workable arrangement that people with different starting points can assess on its merits.

ALC proposes retaining private ownership, competition, professional management, and rewards for skilled work and investment, while adding a limit on individual concentration and a personal ownership stake for everyone. These arrangements should be evaluated together: wider participation needs a productive economy, and a productive economy can support greater independence when its benefits are broadly shared.

The destination: a balanced society

The long-term goal is a society where productive success, shared wellbeing, and personal independence reinforce one another. People should be able to build enterprises, pursue meaningful work, care for others, learn, and create without their standing depending entirely on paid employment. A universal basic income sufficient for a dignified life is one part of that goal, alongside services, productive access, safety, and effective voice. Personal ownership through the People's Trust can contribute income as returns become available; it does not by itself guarantee abundance or adequate provision.

A foundation, not a ceiling. Universal basic income provides lasting security and the freedom to begin again: to recover from a setback, leave a harmful situation, retrain, or start an enterprise. It remains available to everyone, without having to prove hardship or willingness to work. The ambition is for the great majority of people to enjoy incomes substantially above that floor, through rewarding jobs, enterprise, broadly held investments, and shared productive returns, in combinations suited to their lives. This is a goal for widely shared prosperity, not a prediction that paid employment will remain available to most people under every course of automation. Care, learning, and creative or civic activity remain valuable whether or not they earn an income.

Substantial progress toward balance. As productive capacity grows, ALC seeks a society that becomes substantially more balanced in wealth, opportunity, and effective power. Modest improvements are welcome, but are not an adequate endpoint while deep exclusion and concentrated power persist. Recessions, disasters, and institutional failures can reverse measured progress; no framework can promise uninterrupted gains. Such reversals require public explanation and corrective action, not acceptance of diminished opportunity as a new destination. Review must assess both the security of the floor and whether prosperity and opportunity above it are becoming more widely shared.

Benefits and responsibilities

In the United States, about half of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares are held by the wealthiest 1% of households (Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts). The cap targets concentrated holdings, but its incidence depends on actual provision, family aggregation, and the extent of coverage. A lower reference income and a shortfall cut apply together; pension savings are not automatically exempt. Before enactment, distributional estimates must show who would have to sell under each scenario, rather than promise that all ordinary savers gain.

II. Core Principles

1. Independence endures as work changes

Every person should retain a secure place, meaningful choice, and a voice in society, whatever the market value of their labour.

This is ALC's purpose. Every other principle, institution, and number in this document is justified by how well it serves it, and should be revised if it does not.

2. The ceiling rises with the floor

The most anyone may own of artificial labour is measured in multiples of the livelihood floor actually provided to everyone, and falls to one tenth when people go without the Dignity Standard. ALC does not direct how anyone earns, spends, invests, or lives. It sets one ground rule: very large ownership continues only while everyone has the foundations of a good life. Those with the greatest capacity to close a shortfall therefore have the strongest reason to close it.

3. Private enterprise and broad ownership develop together

The means of artificial labour remain privately owned and traded, with professional management and room for competition. A ceiling on each person's covered holdings, counted through every layer of ownership, is proposed as a way to broaden participation. Elected stewardship changes strategic governance at frontier AI developers as described in Section X. The aim is to combine initiative with a durable personal stake for everyone.

4. Every person is a real owner

In each enacting nation, every eligible person has a People's Trust account, with acquisitions building property in their own name, personal votes, and cash dividends. A worldwide floor shares returns beyond those nations. These are protected entitlements, not discretionary favours; opening an account alone does not create its assets.

5. Compulsory sales receive fair-value settlement

Compulsory share sales receive fair-value settlement under Section VIII, with independent valuation and appeal. Holders keep their proceeds, not a guarantee of previous wealth or control. Economic returns below the cap remain theirs. Changes to corporate governance are separately subject to constitutional and treaty requirements; a compensated sale alone does not resolve them.

6. One rule for everyone

The cap applies equally to citizens and foreigners, to individuals and to the entities they control, and to every designated producer of virtual or embodied labour and critical-infrastructure provider. Designation follows the role and evidence, not a group's identity.

7. Public money flows to people, not to governments

Dividends and contributions go directly to people's accounts, never into government treasuries. The only exceptions are services delivered directly to people, such as the direct provision of a child's needs and the Population and Child Welfare Programmes (Section V), and these are paid to service providers, not to governments. Governments fund themselves by taxing people, including their dividend income, which keeps states dependent on and accountable to the people they govern. This is the logic behind "oil-to-cash" proposals for countering the resource curse (Moss, Lambert and Majerowicz, 2015).

8. Frontier capability has accountable stewardship

The developers of the most capable AI systems make decisions that affect everyone. Their direction is set by elected stewards, not by shareholders, while their ownership remains private and dispersed.

9. Work is rewarded

The people who build artificial labour should be paid well. ALC places no limit on salaries, bonuses, or the proceeds of selling shares; it limits how much of artificial labour any one person can keep owning. Because founders are often rewarded through equity, the cap does affect them, and Section VI sets out what they receive.

10. Safety is verified, and basic protections cannot be waived

Licensing, certification, and inspection apply from enactment, regardless of ownership. A majority vote, a dividend, or an investor's claim cannot waive statutory safety, welfare, or standing protections. Ownership of infrastructure does not confer ownership of any subject of experience it may support.

III. The Four Guarantees of Standing

1. Independent livelihood

No one's access to the essentials of life may depend on an employer's goodwill, political loyalty, or acceptance of surveillance.

• Unconditional dividends. Dividends from a person's People's Trust account, and their share of the worldwide floor, are paid without conditions of work, behaviour, political views, data sharing, or use of any particular service. Accounts may be frozen only for fraud or duplicate identity, by an independent decision subject to appeal, and never as a penalty for lawful conduct.
• Paid in money, to an account of the person's choice. Not vouchers, credits, or platform currencies. The limited exception is administration of a child's guardian share under Section V; the child's entitlement remains intact.
• Protected from seizure. Trust holdings cannot be pledged, garnished, or seized, except for court-ordered family support obligations.
• Essential services without political conditions. Designated providers of connectivity, payments, compute, and other essential services may not deny or terminate service for lawful political, religious, union, or social activity. Other terminations require notice, reasons, and independent review.
• Enforceable worker support. Worker-transition entitlements are legal rights with independent appeal, not discretionary grants.

2. Independent productive capacity

People and communities must be able to use artificial labour themselves, and to build alternatives, not merely receive its output.

• Fair access for everyone. Designated providers supply generally available models, chips, compute, and robotic platforms on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms to individuals, cooperatives, community organisations, municipalities, and small firms, not only to large customers.
• A public compute reserve. Designated compute providers reserve a statutory share of capacity (illustratively 10%) for research, education, community, and small-enterprise use, allocated by transparent rules at cost.
• Open models protected. Models below the open-release threshold may be freely used, studied, modified, and shared.
• Right to own, repair, and modify. AI devices and robots sold to the public must remain usable without the manufacturer's ongoing permission, be repairable, and may not be remotely disabled for lawful use. The EU's 2024 right-to-repair directive is a partial precedent.
• Portability and interoperability. People and firms can take their data, workflows, and configurations to another provider. The EU's Digital Markets Act already imposes interoperability duties on large platforms.

3. Effective voice and recourse

When withholding work no longer gives people leverage, other forms of voice must be strong enough to replace it.

• A vote as an owner, cast in person. Every person votes the shares they own in designated providers, including through the People's Trust, pensions, and funds, directly and personally, through the public voting system (Section VII). No one can vote for them.
• A vote as a citizen. Citizens elect the Stewardship Councils that direct frontier AI developers (Section X).
• Organising rights. Workers, users, and citizens may organise collectively, including to negotiate with designated providers over terms of service, without retaliation.
• A human answer to automated decisions. Anyone significantly affected by an automated decision about benefits, employment, credit, housing, education, or legal status has the right to reasons, a human reviewer, and appeal. Article 22 of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation is a partial precedent.
• Access to justice and protected disclosure. Independent courts, legal aid, and collective claims are available against providers, the trust, and governments alike, and people who report abuse are protected from retaliation.

4. Dispersed power

No institution, whether a corporation, a fund manager, the People's Trust, or a government, may control all the routes through which people live and act.

• The ownership cap limits how much of artificial labour any person can own (Section VI).
• Several competing trust managers hold People's Trust accounts, and each person chooses and can switch among them (Section VII).
• No delegated power. No intermediary may cast another person's vote or acquire their personal rights. Protective administration and legal representation preserve the holder's rights; they do not transfer them or confer votes (Section VII).
• Separation of routes. No single institution may combine control of people's income, compute, communications, payments, and identity.
• Limits on automated coercion. Artificial labour may not be used to apply force or mass surveillance against people without meaningful human control and accountability (Section XI).

Measuring standing

An independent body publishes an annual Standing Report. It tracks ownership concentration, the number of independent providers in each layer, dividend coverage, access to the public compute reserve, the outcome of appeals against automated decisions, service terminations, organising activity, and complaints of retaliation. A guarantee that fails in practice is a breach to be corrected (Appendix C), whatever the dividend figures show.

IV. Artificial Labour & Its Providers

Artificial labour is work performed by machines in place of people: systems that perceive, decide, and act with little or no human involvement. It takes two forms:

• Virtual labour: systems that perform cognitive work, support decisions, and carry out tasks through digital environments.
• Embodied labour: systems that perform work through autonomous action in the physical world.

Its providers are the producers of virtual or embodied labour and the critical-infrastructure providers that make this capacity available, whether to others or within their own operations. Its users put that capacity to work. These are roles rather than sector labels: one organisation may perform more than one role, and using artificial labour does not exempt its own qualifying provision.

ALC starts with providers, whose decisions shape the availability of artificial labour. Other large enterprises join through the role-based tiers in Section XVII, beginning with strategic capacity. In-house activities that meet the provider designation thresholds are structurally separated and registered as a new legal entity under the rules below, even if their output is used entirely within the group. The same criteria apply to internal provision and supply to others.

A company becomes a designated provider only above published thresholds of capability, scale, or market power, assessed on evidence by the Safety Authority and an independent competition body, not by ministers. The ownership cap applies to shares in designated providers, counted together across every layer.

Broad provider roles

The following roles express the proposal's priorities, not fixed sector or market definitions. Detailed boundaries and designation thresholds are left to publicly reasoned rules, independent assessment, and review (Section XVIII).

All designated providers are subject to the ownership cap from year 5, and to oversight and the guarantees from enactment. Elected councils remain limited to frontier AI developers, reflecting the society-wide effects of their capability decisions. Other large productive enterprises join through expansion from year 5 whenever the Dignity Standard falls short, with strategic capacity first and wider infrastructure second (Section XVII). A provider already designated under this section does not wait for its expansion tier.

Strategic capacity

The first expansion priority is capacity with a substantial bearing on collective security, autonomy, or society's ability to choose its direction. This can include large-scale deployment of artificial labour where its effects are strategic; size or a sector label alone does not settle that question. The proposal pairs wider ownership with continued security protections, lawful limits on disclosure, and democratic oversight. Public bodies carrying out sovereign functions remain under democratic control and the limits on automated coercion. State holdings in designated providers and covered enterprises remain subject to the cap.

Divisions of larger groups

Many providers are divisions inside larger groups. When a designated activity sits within a wider enterprise, it is structurally separated into its own legal entity, with its own assets, staff, accounts, and shares. The cap then applies to holdings in that entity, counted through the parent company (Section VI). Dealings between the entity and its former group are at arm's length and published. The United Kingdom has required large banks to ring-fence retail banking since 2019, and the European Union's 2009 energy rules require transmission networks to be separated from generation and supply.

Rules of designation

• Thresholds are published in advance and reviewed on a fixed cycle.
• Capability and market power are assessed across the whole controlled group. Splitting activities among subsidiaries, partners, or offshore entities does not avoid designation.
• Contracts that reproduce designated activity, such as exclusive compute leases or proxy deployment, are designated with the same force.
• Decisions state their evidence and reasons and may be appealed on an expedited basis.
• A provider designated for the first time gives its holders a grace period (illustratively three years) before the cap applies to it, so that founders of successful start-ups have time to sell in an orderly way.
• A provider that falls durably below threshold may be de-designated, and the cap then ceases to apply to it.

The host nation

A provider's host nation is the country where it has its place of effective management, meaning where its key strategic and operational decisions are actually made, as in international tax law. This is always the national level, not a state or province, and not merely the place of incorporation: a company incorporated in Delaware but run from California is hosted by the United States. After designation, moving incorporation or headquarters does not change the host nation without approval from the Safety Authority and the international committee, so relocation cannot be used to escape the cap.

What is not covered

Small and medium firms, start-ups below thresholds, open-source projects below the open-release threshold, ordinary research, and the general use of AI and robots are not designated. A firm comes within ALC by crossing a published threshold, not by adopting the technology.

V. The Dignity Standard

What the standard requires

Every eligible person must have all of the following, through their basic income and through guaranteed public access. Each component is measured against what is ordinary and current, not against a cheaper second tier.

Who defines it

An independent Dignity Standard Commission, within the statistical body and advised by a randomly selected, paid citizens' panel, publishes measurable standards and reviews them at least every three years. National living conditions inform concrete space, service, and quality requirements, not a continuously moving requirement that everyone rank above a median. The standard may be raised, but never lowered in real or quality terms. Revisions require evidence of advances, a delivery and cost assessment, public reasons, and independent appeal; they may not be engineered to trigger expansion. The cost assessed at enactment sets the cap's inflation-indexed benchmark, not its actual reference income (Section VI).

How it is met

The standard measures outcomes, not spending. Legislatures choose how to meet it: through the cash basic income, the People's Trust dividends, the public compute reserve, public housing and production facilities, public services, or any combination. What counts is whether every person actually has every component, not how much has been budgeted.

Entitlements, not charity

Basic income, trust dividends, the global floor, worker support, and the guarantees are legal entitlements. Clear eligibility rules and impartial administration make provision dependable for recipients and responsibilities predictable for delivery institutions. Voluntary charity can complement these arrangements, but access to the entitlements does not depend on it.

• A public offence. In administering or authoritatively communicating an entitlement, it is an offence to:
  • misrepresent a legal entitlement as discretionary charity, aid, a gift, or a favour in regulations, forms, payment notices, or delivery communications;
  • brand its delivery as the personal or political generosity of an official, party, government, or company; or
  • condition, delay, or threaten to withhold an entitlement on any ground not in law, including gratitude, loyalty, political support, or silence.
  The offence covers holders of public office, elected representatives, members of Stewardship Councils, officers and staff of the People's Trust, worker funds, and delivery institutions, and staff of designated providers or employers when they act in the administration of an entitlement.
• Graduated by responsibility. Remedies include correction, a public finding, fines, and removal from administration for serious or repeated abuse. Coercion or political withholding is aggravated. Removal from elected office and fixed-period disqualification (illustratively five years) require a judicial finding of serious abuse of entitlement powers, never merely a description used in political debate.
• Fair process. Incorrect delivery documents must be corrected promptly. Personal sanctions require knowledge or recklessness, a hearing before an independent adjudicator named in law, and judicial appeal. Affected people have a remedy.
• No patronage branding. Payments and services are delivered in the entitlement's name, not as anyone's gift. Neutral identification of the responsible institution for accountability is permitted; political promotion is not.
• Existing rights too. The same rule protects rights people already hold, such as pensions, social insurance, and public services. These too may not be officially presented as charity.
• Opinion stays free. Criticism, campaigning, parliamentary debate, and proposals to change the law are protected, including by officeholders. The offence concerns abuse of entitlement administration, not opinions about ALC or the words used to express them.

Children's rights

Every child is a full holder of rights in their own name, not an extension of their parents' claims.

• A child's own standard. Every child has the Dignity Standard on their own terms: a safe home with space of their own as they grow, nutritious food, healthcare, education, play, and protection from neglect, abuse, and exploitation. Housing is measured per person, so a home overcrowded for its children is a shortfall like any other.
• A child's own property. A child's People's Trust account belongs to the child. A statutory portion of dividends (illustratively half) is the guardian share, usable only for the child's needs; the rest is saved until adulthood. Birth order never reduces an allocation or distribution rate. It changes only whether the guardian share is administered as cash or direct provision; accumulated and inherited holdings can still differ.
• Cash for up to two births per parent. For children born after enactment, each legal parent may receive the guardian share in cash for children from no more than two births. A multiple birth counts as one birth. Children born before enactment, and adopted, fostered, and step-children, do not count.
  • Where a child has two legal parents, half of the guardian share is attributed to each. A parent within their two-birth limit receives their half in cash; for a parent beyond it, their half is applied directly to the child's needs. A child who is one parent's third and the other's first therefore receives half the guardian share in cash and half in direct provision.
  • A single legal parent's whole guardian share counts against that parent's limit.
  • Under shared custody, any cash share is divided between the households in proportion to the care each provides.
  • If care passes to someone other than a legal parent, such as a relative, foster carer, or adoptive parent, that carer receives the full guardian share in cash, whatever the child's birth order.
• Direct provision. The responsible delivery institution applies non-cash guardian shares to the child's housing, food, clothing, care, and education under an individual plan, accessible to the family and reviewable by the children's advocate. Unspent amounts return to the child's account. Provision supplements the Dignity Standard and must be timely, equivalent in value, and free of administrative charges to the child's share. A move or family separation does not erase a parent's birth count; the custody and carer rules above still apply. This limits parental cash administration, not the child's property or needs.
• Accountable guardians. Child protection services, independent of the bodies that pay entitlements, can require that a child's share be applied to the child's needs or paid to another carer where a child is neglected. Their decisions follow the child's interests, with independent appeal, and never reduce the child's own entitlement.
• A voice of their own. Children have the right to be heard in decisions that affect them, and an independent children's advocate can bring claims on their behalf.

• Health and education for every child, without exception. Every child receives regular health checks, all needed healthcare, nutritious meals at school, and a full, high-quality education. Governments must track every child's health and schooling and act whenever a child falls behind or drops out.
• Stepping in when a child's needs are unmet. When parents cannot or will not provide what a child needs, the government must provide it directly, through additional support for the family, supervised care, or, by court order and as a last resort, alternative care of a quality that meets the Dignity Standard. No child's welfare is left to chance because of their family's circumstances.
• No tolerance of abuse. Every credible report of child abuse or neglect must be investigated within a fixed deadline (illustratively 24 hours where a child may be in danger). An official who knowingly ignores or conceals the abuse or neglect of a child commits an aggravated public offence, under the same procedure as the offence in the section on entitlements above.
• Measured by outcomes. The Standing Report publishes every year how many children are healthy, safe, and progressing in education, by region and group. A government's failure to protect children is a breach (Appendix C) and a Dignity Standard shortfall.

Dignity and responsibility

ALC equips people to learn, contribute in their own ways, care for their children, and take part in public decisions. These expectations are cultivated through education, culture, and opportunity. They are never conditions on entitlements. Dignity is not a reward for an official's judgment of a person's productivity, diligence, or learning.

Population and abundance: a binding duty

Every participating government must adopt and carry out a Population and Child Welfare Plan, reviewed independently and reported in the Standing Report each year. It must include, at a minimum:

• A sustainable population path. Published demographic projections and a target path consistent with providing the full Dignity Standard to everyone, within the limits of land, water, energy, and ecosystems, revised at each review.
• Universal family-planning access. Free, confidential, and easily available contraception of every kind, including long-acting methods, and reproductive healthcare for everyone.
• Education for family life. Comprehensive education for every young person on reproduction, family planning, and the responsibilities of raising a child, and preparation courses for prospective parents, free and universally available.
• Full education and opportunity for women and girls. Universal education and equal economic opportunity for women and girls, which are among the most effective known means of reducing unplanned births. Long-range projections attribute much of the expected slowing of world population growth to them (Vollset et al., 2020).
• Universal support for every child. Home visits by trained health and family workers for every newborn and young child, universal early-childhood health checks, quality childcare and early education, and parenting support for every family. Finland's maternity and child health clinics, used by almost every family, are a partial precedent.
• Strong child protection. Well-resourced, independent child protection services with powers to intervene where a child is neglected or harmed, including requiring parenting support, supervising care, and, by court order and as a last resort, placing a child in alternative care. Parents carry an enforceable legal duty to care for and raise their children, and neglect has legal consequences for the parent, never for the child's entitlements.

Effective, not symbolic. Plans are judged by results, not by announcements. Where fertility stays above the agreed path, or children's health and education fall short, the government must strengthen its measures within a fixed period, under independent review, and receives international support to do so. Non-invasive does not mean weak. But missing the path is not, by itself, misconduct: it requires stronger rights-respecting measures, never coercion, and never sanctions on its own (see below).

Enforcement. Failure to adopt, fund, or carry out the plan is a breach (Appendix C). Courts can order the government to act. A child who is not receiving the care and upbringing the plan requires, through a failure of public services, counts as a Dignity Standard shortfall, with the same consequences for the cap as any other.

Population planning and fair participation

Per-person sharing and population-weighted institutions need funding and representation rules that remain fair as populations change. A fixed fund must support more recipients when population grows, and its design may create incentives for state population policy. The strength of those incentives is uncertain. ALC proposes shared planning obligations that protect reproductive choice, every child's entitlement, and fair participation across nations, while prohibiting state policies intended to increase fund allocations or institutional influence through demographic expansion.

• A replacement ceiling on state policy. No participating government may set, promote, or reward population growth above replacement level as a policy goal. Demographic expansion for economic, military, or regional influence is prohibited as state policy.
• No pronatalist campaigns or escalating rewards. Official campaigns urging families to have more children than replacement are prohibited, as are cash bonuses, tax advantages, housing priority, or other rewards whose per-child value rises with birth order beyond the second child. Support provided at the same rate for every child, such as universal child benefits, childcare, and family services, is not a reward and remains permitted. Children's needs are met equally for every child, through services and their own entitlements, never as a reward to parents.
• Convergence where fertility is high. Where fertility exceeds replacement, the Population and Child Welfare Plan must set a path to reach it within a fixed period (illustratively 15 years), through education, opportunity for women and girls, and universal family planning, and must report progress every year.

How the path is measured. A state's agreed path is a path of fertility, converging to replacement, applied to its actual population. Population above the path that comes from migration, including refugees, from longer lives, or from the momentum of an existing young age structure counts as on the path. Only growth attributable to fertility above the agreed path counts as excess. The international committee publishes its method and calculations, and states may appeal to an independent panel.

No additional state influence from growth above the path. Population-weighted committee votes, state-level institutional allocations, and nomination weights use the agreed population path, not growth from fertility above it. This rule applies without a misconduct finding and does limit representation relative to actual population; the treaty must make that trade-off explicit. It never reduces individual Global Floor payments, needs-based services, or child-welfare support. Good-faith states retain recognition and receive support.

What counts as misconduct. Sanctions apply only to misconduct, found by an independent panel after a hearing, with appeal. Misconduct means any of:

• setting, promoting, or rewarding population growth above replacement, or demographic expansion for influence, as state policy;
• official pronatalist campaigns, or rewards whose per-child value rises with birth order beyond the second child; or
• failing to adopt, fund, or carry out the Population and Child Welfare Plan, or to strengthen it when required.

A state that has done all of this in good faith, but whose fertility remains above its path, is not in misconduct. It receives support, not sanctions.

Liability falls on states; individual rights remain protected. Trade and fiscal consequences can still affect people's livelihoods, so measures require a proportionality assessment and protection of essential supplies. A state found in misconduct:

1. funds the floor above its path. Every person in its territory still receives the equal global floor. But the Global Floor Fund meets the floor only for the population on the state's agreed path; the state must fund the remainder from its own budget. If it does not, the fund pays people directly, and the cost becomes a debt of the state's government, payable from its own budget with interest. It is never recovered from the People's Trust, from Commons Access Contributions, which belong to the People's Trust, or from any person's entitlement. Until the debt is paid, recognition stays suspended, and participating states may apply agreed trade measures against the breaching state;
2. loses recognition. Its providers lose mutual recognition and pay Commons Access Contributions in every participating market, and the state loses its vote in the international committee until it complies. After it complies, its voting weight remains reduced (illustratively by half) for a period at least as long as the breach lasted, and no less than ten years, so that pursuing population growth for influence cannot pay off; and
3. is publicly reported. The Standing Report and the international committee publish the breach, its cost, and who bears it.

Support for states acting in good faith. A fixed share of the Global Floor Fund's annual income (illustratively 5%) is set aside, before the equal individual payments are calculated, for Population and Child Welfare Programmes in countries working in good faith to reach replacement: family planning, girls' education, maternal and child health, and child protection. The deduction and its effect on individual payments are published every year. Programme funds are paid only to independent, audited service providers, such as clinics, schools, and health and child-protection services, which deliver services directly to people. They are never paid as budget support to governments. The international committee selects providers through open competition, evaluates results independently, and publishes every grant and its outcomes on the open ledger.

Within human rights, without exception. Strong does not mean coercive. The obligations above bind governments: what they promote, reward, fund, and plan. Forced or pressured sterilisation, compulsory limits on family size, mandatory contraception, penalties on families for having children, and reductions in any person's or child's entitlements on these grounds are prohibited. They violate fundamental rights, they fall hardest on the poorest and on children who chose nothing, and they would hand governments the very power over people's bodies and lives that ALC exists to prevent.

Having many children, rapid population growth, and overcrowding are therefore matters for the government's binding duties of planning and care, and for the obligations on states above. They are never reasons to cancel, reduce, condition, or delay the basic income, the Dignity Standard, or any other entitlement, nor to block the sharing of abundance. Where population growth strains provision, that is a shortfall to be met by planning and building, with the same consequences for the cap as any other shortfall.

Measurement

The annual Standing Report uses independent surveys and administrative data to measure effective access, with methods and uncertainty published. The right is universal; the system-level trigger is a coverage test. A gap affecting more than a small share of people (illustratively 0.5%), or a systematic gap in any region or identifiable group, triggers the shortfall consequences. Isolated gaps require individual remedies within 90 days; unresolved gaps also count at review. A favourable national average never excuses exclusion, and an isolated case does not imply that nobody receives a component.

Milestones

Meeting the full standard for everyone cannot happen instantly. ALC sets milestones that match the cap schedule, so the standard is reached in fifteen years:

Multiples are of the reference income (Section VI). Years and multiples are illustrative; the rule that a shortfall cuts the cap by a large factor is not.

Who delivers it

Ownership incentives need to be matched by delivery capacity. For each component, implementing law names a responsible delivery institution (for example, a housing authority, an education authority, or the public compute reserve), gives it the legal powers and statutory funding it needs, and makes it answerable to the Standing Report. Shortfalls are reported by component, region, and institution, so that remedies can be directed where they are needed.

• An individual right. From the component's milestone above, anyone lacking it can claim provision from the responsible institution, with independent appeal and a deadline (illustratively 90 days). Courts can order provision. A private dwelling is claimable from year 5, a quality home from year 15. Emergency shelter must be provided without delay, with 30 days an outer limit, not permission to leave someone in immediate danger.
• Emergencies and disasters. When a disaster destroys homes or services, people affected receive immediate emergency provision of decent quality, and the responsible institutions publish a recovery plan with deadlines. A recovery plan restores the standard; it never waives it, and it does not suspend the consequences below.

When the standard falls short

1. A much lower cap. If a milestone is not met at its date, or a component previously met falls short at any annual review, the cap falls to one tenth of the scheduled multiple, and stays there until the Standing Report confirms that the standard is met again. When it is confirmed met, the scheduled multiple is restored for the future, and holders may again hold up to it. Holders pushed above the reduced cap sell the excess within the normal compliance period (Section VI).
2. Extension to the wider economy, from year 5. From the year-5 review onward, each annual review with a shortfall brings the next tier within the cap, by operation of law: strategic capacity, infrastructure, productive foundations, essential provision, coordination and access, then all other large enterprises. Large enterprises directly supplying the missing component join at the same review. If the full standard is still unmet at year 15, all remaining tiers join. Coverage continues under the release rules in Section XVII.
3. Consistent application. Independent measurement determines whether the standard is met. The same consequences apply during recessions, budget constraints, emergencies, or changing market conditions, alongside the delivery and recovery support needed to restore provision.

The aim is to connect ownership incentives with shared wellbeing. A lower cap does not itself deliver a quality life; provision still requires investment, skills, and accountable institutions. It gives large holders a continuing interest in supporting that work, while wider ownership gives more people a stake in the productive capacity on which they depend.

VI. The Ownership Cap

The reference income

The cap is a multiple of the reference income. From the first cap step onward, one rule applies, whether or not a basic income exists. The reference income is the lower of two measures:

• The benchmark: the yearly cost, for one adult, of meeting the Dignity Standard (Section V), as assessed at enactment. It is fixed in real terms and adjusted only for inflation, so later revisions of the standard cannot raise the cap without anyone being provided with more.
• The floor actually provided: the common annual floor of unconditional cash and effective in-kind provision to adults in the enacting nation, verified under Section V's coverage test. Cash includes basic income and vested trust and global dividends. In-kind provision is valued at the cost of meeting the published standard, counting effective access rather than compulsory use and avoiding double counting. Private earnings and unfunded promises do not count.

The statistical body measures total provision per adult before identifying the common floor, so different cash and service mixes can meet it. Isolated gaps receive the remedies in Section V; they do not erase provision to everybody else. Enacting law must specify valuation and measurement before the first step. If no common floor is actually provided, the reference income is zero: the remedy is to fund and deliver a floor, not invent one or postpone the cap.

The reference income cannot exceed the inflation-indexed benchmark. It can rise toward that ceiling as provision improves; the ceiling, not every annual increase, is limited to inflation. Adding cash without withdrawing services cannot lower the measured floor. A fall in the reference income and the tenfold shortfall cut can apply together, intentionally, and may reach savers beyond the very wealthy. Holders have a fixed period (illustratively two years) to comply with a falling reference income. Distributional and financing tests must examine this combined effect before enactment.

The schedule

Each step is enacted at the outset. Holders above a step must reduce their holdings to it by its date. Each multiple is valid only if the Dignity Standard milestone for that date is met (Section V); otherwise the cap is one tenth of it. The schedule can be brought forward by published triggers (Section IX). It is never postponed.

What the cap limits, and what it does not

The cap limits ownership and control of covered productive capacity, not personal wealth as such. Holders who sell keep the proceeds and may hold them in cash, bonds, homes, or other assets outside the cap. Reinvestment in covered enterprises remains subject to the same combined ceiling, including enterprises added through expansion (Section XVII). The purpose is to make productive ownership a more widely shared foundation of independence. Taxation of wealth more generally remains a matter for democratic choice.

Who is a holder

• Every natural person, wherever they live and whatever their nationality.
• Families. Holdings of spouses and partners, minor children, and trusts or entities held for the family's benefit are added together. Gifts to adult relatives within ten years before a cap step are attributed back to the giver.
• Entities without human owners. Foundations, endowments, charities, and state bodies, including foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds, are each treated as a single holder subject to the same cap, so that ownership cannot be parked where no person appears to hold it.
• Funds held for the many. Pension funds, index funds, mutual funds, and insurance funds are not holders in themselves. Their holdings are attributed to the people who own them, in proportion.
• Recognised people's funds. The People's Trust and foreign funds meeting equivalent requirements for identifiable beneficiaries, protected entitlements, and direct personal voting are looked through to beneficiaries. State ownership on behalf of a population alone does not qualify; recognition requires those protections in practice.

Counting through every layer

A person's covered holding is the sum, across all designated providers, of the person's share of each provider's value, traced through every company, fund, trust, partnership, and contract in between. If a person owns 1% of a holding company, which owns 10% of a designated provider worth 1 trillion, the person's covered holding in that provider is 1% × 10% × 1 trillion = 1 billion. Tracing continues through as many layers as exist.

Each unit of value is counted once. When one designated provider owns shares in another, that stake is already part of the parent's market value, so it is not counted again through the parent. For example, if a person holds shares in a designated cloud provider, and that provider owns part of a designated AI developer, the person's holding is the market value of their cloud-provider shares. Their indirect interest in the AI developer is not added on top. When the owning company is not itself designated, such as a conglomerate whose designated activity has been separated into its own entity, the person's indirect interest in the separated entity is counted through the parent.

What counts

Covered holdings include shares, options, warrants, convertibles, and contracts giving economic exposure to or control over provider shares. Ordinary loans and bonds are excluded unless convertible, controlling, or designed to reproduce ownership. For cap reporting, private companies are independently valued and listed prices may be averaged over a period (illustratively three months). Compulsory purchases use settlement values under Section VIII, not a guaranteed historical price.

Votes follow ownership

In designated providers, voting power may not exceed economic ownership. Dual-class and super-voting shares convert to one share, one vote at the elected-stewardship step, no later than year 3. Only natural persons vote, directly (Section VII), including on shares held through companies and funds. Entities without human owners have economic rights but no votes. Proxies, voting powers of attorney, and agreements giving one person another's vote are void and prohibited; controlled shares also count toward the attempted controller's cap.

This deliberately changes group control: a parent board does not cast its shareholders' votes in a designated subsidiary. Managers still conduct ordinary operations, but reserved shareholder decisions go to the underlying owners. Structural separation, financing, and corporate charters must reflect that division, rather than promise unchanged parent control.

Anti-avoidance

• Transfers to any entity, trust, or person in which the seller retains an interest, direct or indirect, reduce the covered holding only by the share that leaves the seller's look-through interest.
• Nominee, custodial, and offshore holdings are attributed to their beneficial owners. Holdings whose owners cannot be traced are dealt with under the traceability rule below.
• Arrangements to hold shares on another person's behalf, informally or by side agreement, are void and count toward the true owner's cap.
• Coordinated arrangements to exercise control are treated as one holder. Public recommendations, organising, and independently choosing the same vote do not alone establish such an arrangement.

Traceability: no trace, no trade

Who is traceable. A holder is traceable when every layer of ownership between it and the natural persons who ultimately benefit is disclosed to the ownership register and independently verified. The chain may end only in natural persons or in recognised entities: the People's Trust, recognised people's funds, and foundations and state bodies treated as single holders (see above). If any link in the chain is anonymous, unverified, or held in a jurisdiction that refuses to disclose it, the whole chain is untraceable.

Full disclosure of every layer. Every company, trust, partnership, foundation, fund, nominee, and custodian holding provider shares must disclose its complete ownership chain. Anonymous instruments or arrangements that prevent verification of beneficial ownership may not be used to hold them.

Widely held companies and funds. A listed company or regulated fund with many owners cannot name every small shareholder in real time. It may report owners whose look-through exposure to designated providers is below a small threshold (illustratively 1 times the reference income) as dispersed holders, but only if it is regulated in a jurisdiction that exchanges beneficial-ownership data with the register. Because that data identifies people across all their accounts, someone who spreads holdings across many small accounts or companies is still identified and aggregated. Everyone above the threshold must be named.

Verification before transfer. From enactment, share registrars, custodians, and brokers may register or settle a purchase or transfer of shares in a designated provider only when the receiving holder's ownership chain is traceable.

Deadlines for existing holdings. Holders that are untraceable on enactment have a fixed period (illustratively 12 months) to disclose their full ownership chain. After that deadline:

1. All voting and dividend rights on the untraceable holding are suspended. Dividends are held in escrow.
2. If the holder is still untraceable after a further period (illustratively 6 months), the entire holding, not only any excess over the cap, is sold to the People's Trust at fair market value.
3. The proceeds and escrowed dividends are held for whoever proves beneficial ownership, subject to the cap and to penalties for concealment. Unclaimed amounts are treated like other unclaimed property and pass to the People's Trust after a long period (illustratively 10 years).

Penalties. False or incomplete disclosure, and arrangements designed to hide beneficial ownership, are offences, with fines and, for deliberate concealment, criminal liability. Concealed holdings count toward the true owner's cap from the date they were acquired.

These duties build on existing standards. The Financial Action Task Force's recommendations require countries to ensure that the beneficial owners of companies and legal arrangements are known to authorities. The United Kingdom's Register of Overseas Entities, created by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, requires foreign entities that own UK land to disclose their beneficial owners or face restrictions on selling, leasing, or mortgaging it. More than a hundred jurisdictions exchange financial-account information automatically under the OECD's Common Reporting Standard.

Reporting and privacy

Designated providers, custodians, funds, and intermediaries report beneficial owners to the ownership register, building on the registers created on enactment (Section XI). Funds report on a look-through basis. Every person whose covered holding exceeds a reporting threshold (illustratively 100 times the reference income) files an annual declaration; everyone else is covered automatically by fund and custodian reporting and need do nothing. Authorities, auditors, and the international committee have full access to the register. The public sees the identities and holdings of everyone above the reporting threshold, because holdings that large are a matter of public interest, while smaller holders' details stay private. In WM and Sovim (2022), the EU Court of Justice struck down unrestricted public access to beneficial-ownership registers as a disproportionate intrusion on privacy, so public access must be limited to what that public interest requires.

Selling, and automatic sale

1. Sale on the market. Holders above a step may sell to anyone whose own covered holding stays within the cap, at any price they agree. Most shares are expected to be sold this way, to pension funds, index funds, and individual investors.
2. Standing offer from the People's Trust. The trust accepts excess shares under Section VIII's valuation and settlement rules. This is not an unlimited cash guarantee or a guarantee of a past market price.
3. Automatic sale. Excess shares not sold by a step's deadline, plus a short grace period (illustratively six months), transfer automatically to the People's Trust at fair market value, paid as described in Section VIII. The former holder keeps the full proceeds.

Growth above the cap

A successful investment may grow above the cap through rising prices alone. Holders may exceed the cap by up to a tolerance (illustratively 25%) because of price increases, with two years to sell any excess above the tolerance. No one is forced to sell because of a single good month on the stock market.

Founders, early investors, and the Founding Fellowship

Founders and early investors receive fair-value settlement for compulsory sales, not a guarantee of prior wealth or permanent control. Each designated provider maintains a Founding Fellowship: an independent panel recognises foundational contributions by founders, investors, researchers, and engineers. Fellows enter a permanent public record and may join an annual forum, mentor, and advise. Fellowship is personal, not hereditary or saleable, and confers no votes, seats, vetoes, or commercial privileges.

VII. The People's Trust

Personal accounts

• Who has one. Every citizen and lawful long-term resident of the enacting nation, including children from birth. Treaty rules coordinate overlapping eligibility without duplicate allocations. Children's dividends follow Section V's guardian-share and saving rules. People outside participating nations share through the Global Floor Fund, not automatically through national share accounts.
• What it holds. Real shares in designated providers, and over time a diversified portfolio, recorded in the person's own name. Each person receives statements, can see exactly what they own, and is the legal beneficial owner.
• How it grows. Shares the trust pays for in full are allocated equally to every eligible person's account, once a year. Shares bought with notes vest into accounts, equally, as the notes are repaid (Section VIII). Holdings already in an account stay there.
• Dividends. Dividends on a person's vested shares are paid to them in money, after the contribution to the worldwide floor (Section XIII) and a small published administration cost. Payments are unconditional (Section III).
• Inheritance. On death, holdings pass to heirs' trust accounts within their caps; excess inherited shares return to the common allocation with fair-value settlement to the estate. With no heirs, holdings return to the common allocation. Equal new allocations do not erase differences in age, accumulated holdings, or inheritance.

Why the shares cannot be sold

People cannot sell, pledge, or cash out their trust stakes; court-ordered family support is the limited seizure exception. Otherwise hardship could force people to surrender their ownership. Managers may rebalance underlying investments under the rules below, but the proceeds remain in the account. Cap compliance and inheritance transfers follow the same fair-value rules and do not create a voluntary cash-out right. Income, personal votes, information, manager choice, and inheritance remain.

Votes in people's hands

Every vote attached to shares in a designated provider, whether held in a People's Trust account, a pension, an index fund, or directly, is cast only by the person who owns it, personally and directly, or not at all. The proposal separates investment administration from personal voting so that wider economic ownership also carries a direct voice. Managers and advisers can provide services and analysis, while each owner retains the choice. This design requires accessible information and practical assistance; its participation costs and turnout effects need evaluation.

• No delegated votes or transferred rights. No manager, adviser, proxy service, company, guardian, or official may vote for another person. Votes and personal entitlements cannot be transferred, lent, sold, or assigned. An uncast vote stays uncast.
• Administration is not delegation. Custody, record-keeping, and buying and selling investments within a mandate set by law, or by a fund a person has chosen, are administrative functions, not personal rights. Trust and fund managers perform them under statute and published mandates, and these functions carry no votes and no power over anyone's entitlements.
• Assistance is not delegation. A person who needs help to use the voting system, because of disability or literacy, may receive assistance to cast their own choice, under the same safeguards as in public elections. The choice remains theirs.
• Protection is not transfer. Guardians, advocates, and legal representatives may secure payments, information, and remedies for children or people unable to act, under fiduciary duties and independent review. They cannot acquire the entitlement, cast a vote, or override an expressed capable choice. Where manager choice cannot be exercised, statutory assignment applies.
• Children. Votes on children's accounts are not cast until the child reaches adulthood. Guardians do not vote for them.
• Information, not instructions. Anyone may publish analysis and recommendations, as in any election, but no one may receive a vote to cast.
• Routine decisions by votes cast. Because undirected votes are not cast, routine shareholder decisions in designated providers, such as approving accounts or electing directors, are taken by a majority of the votes actually cast. Low turnout cannot paralyse a company, and no one may cast the silent votes instead.
• Consequential decisions need broad approval. Decisions that change what owners own, including mergers, sale of core assets or capabilities, issuing new shares beyond a small annual limit, changes to the company's constitution, and dissolution, require both a two-thirds majority of the votes cast and participation of at least a minimum share of all shares outstanding (illustratively 25%), over a voting period of at least 30 days. If either threshold is not met, the proposal fails and the status quo continues. At minimum, a consequential change therefore needs the support of one sixth of all shares outstanding (two-thirds of a 25% turnout), not merely a majority of whoever happens to vote, which makes it far harder for a small organised minority to remake a company while most owners are not watching.

The public voting system

Votes are cast online through a secure public voting system, run as e-government infrastructure by an independent electoral authority and overseen by public volunteer observers, as public elections are.

• Personal and secure. Each person authenticates with their own secure digital identity and votes on their own device or at public access points.
• Verifiable results, secret choices. Open-source software, independent audits, and public tests support verification of recorded votes and published totals without revealing individual choices. Secrecy alone does not prevent coercion at a person's device. Protected access points, recovery from compromised credentials, and safeguards against vote buying must be demonstrated before binding use; no design may let an intermediary cast the vote instead.
• Overseen, not controlled. The electoral authority runs the system; government and public volunteer observers oversee it. No minister, provider, or trust manager can see individual votes or alter results.
• One system for every vote. Shareholder votes in designated providers, votes on People's Trust holdings, and elections for Stewardship Councils all use the same system, so people need to learn only one.
• A manageable workload. Votes are grouped into a few published voting windows each year, except where law requires urgency. Every proposal comes with a plain-language summary, the arguments for and against, and the full documents. People are notified of every vote in which they hold shares.
• A public record of promises. Directors and Stewardship Council candidates publish their commitments on the system. Owners and citizens can question them publicly, and their votes and decisions are recorded against what they promised.

Estonia first used internet voting in local elections in 2005 and parliamentary elections in 2007. It demonstrates use at scale, not that every security problem is solved. ALC's system must be independently tested before binding votes (Appendix D).

Several competing managers

Accounts are held by several independent, licensed trust managers (illustratively at least five), which compete on cost, service, and stewardship. Each person chooses a manager and may switch at any time; people who do not choose are assigned at random. Managers hold assets in segregated custody, may not lend shares for voting purposes, and are audited and published like every other part of the trust. Sweden's premium pension system, which lets savers choose among many funds, and its several independent national pension buffer funds are partial precedents.

Investment rules

Shares acquired through the cap are concentrated in designated providers. Managers may diversify gradually into a broad portfolio under published rules, so that people's dividends do not depend on one industry, while a statutory minimum share stays in designated providers, so that ownership of artificial labour stays broad.

Independence

The trust's governing board is appointed through a published, competence-based process for fixed terms and may be removed only on defined grounds. No minister may direct it, the treasury may not borrow from it, and its assets cannot be redirected except by amending the founding statute with an enhanced majority. Its accounts are part of the open ledger (Section XIII). Precedents for independent public trusts paying people directly include the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has paid an equal annual dividend since 1982.

VIII. Financing the Transition

Buyers and transition capacity

The cap will require some of the largest holders to sell very large amounts of shares over fifteen years. Most of these sales are expected to go to the existing market: pension funds, index funds, insurance funds, and individual investors, whose holdings are attributed to millions of people and stay far below the cap. The People's Trust buys what the market does not absorb, through its standing offer and automatic sales. Phasing the cap over three steps and fifteen years spreads the selling so the market can absorb it.

Price

Every sale to the People's Trust uses fair market value at settlement, with independent review. Listed prices over a recent period (illustratively three months) inform checks for manipulation, not a guaranteed trailing-price premium over current value. Private holdings require independent valuation. Methods and results are published and may be challenged before an independent tribunal.

Advance notice and a fifteen-year schedule are intended to support orderly adjustment, but cannot guarantee stable prices. Announcing the cap may lower the value of affected shares, and settlement reflects their value at sale rather than a guarantee of previous wealth. Financing and distributional assessments must account for that risk.

How the trust pays

The trust pays available cash and People's Trust Notes for the balance: tradeable, long-term bonds secured on the acquired pool. The cash plus the independently assessed market value of the notes at issue must equal the purchase price; face value alone is not compensation if the notes are worth less. Credit risk affects their terms and subsequent price. Alternatively, a holder may elect an orderly market sale over a published period (illustratively up to two years), receiving realised proceeds less costs and bearing price risk. Neither route guarantees immediate cash at a past valuation.

The acquisition pool

Shares bought with notes are held in a separate acquisition pool until they are paid for. Its rules are binding:

• Ownership. Pool shares are held by the trust as custodian for all eligible persons collectively, in equal unvested shares. They are not assets of the trust managers, the government, or the noteholders.
• Votes. Each eligible person votes an equal fraction of the pool's shares directly, through the public voting system. Votes not cast by people are not cast at all. Trustees, managers, and noteholders never vote pool shares.
• Gradual vesting. Repayment from pool income or other funding releases a proportionate share of the remaining assets into personal accounts equally. Selling collateral to repay debt does not also vest the sold shares: it reduces the unvested allocation. The reconciliation tracks repayment, asset sales, and vesting separately.
• Payment order. Dividends on pool shares go first to interest and then to scheduled principal on that pool's notes. Any remainder accelerates vesting. The contribution to the Global Floor Fund and personal dividends apply only to vested shares.
• Security and losses. Notes are secured only on the pool's shares and their dividends, with no recourse to personal accounts, other pools, or the government unless the legislature expressly guarantees them. If pool income and the trust's other inflows fall short, the trust may sell pool shares on the market, to buyers within the cap, to make payments. On default, noteholders' only remedy is the sale of pool shares to buyers within the cap and payment of the proceeds; they can never take ownership of shares beyond their own cap or acquire votes. Any loss after the pool is exhausted falls on the noteholders and on the unvested pool, never on shares already vested in personal accounts.

The trust's inflows are:

• dividends on shares it holds;
• the citizen share of the Automation Dividend (Section XII);
• Commons Access Contributions from foreign providers selling into the market (Section XIV);
• any further public endowment the legislature chooses to authorise.

Multi-year reconciliation and funding before sale

A single year cannot show whether the transition is affordable. The People's Trust therefore publishes, for every acquisition pool, a reconciliation over the life of its notes: shares remaining, their value as collateral, expected dividends, interest and principal due, shares vested, shares sold, and the projected gap, under central and adverse assumptions. It is updated every year and independently audited.

Before each step, the legislature must authorise funding for the projected gap under adverse assumptions, including overlapping expansion tiers. A consolidated budget must separate acquisition finance, worker support, and Dignity Standard delivery, count no revenue twice, and allow for access contributions ending when nations gain recognition. Low-dividend and falling-price scenarios are essential.

Lack of funding never postpones the cap. The trust instead sells pool shares to eligible buyers, with losses governed by the pool rules. This preserves divestment, not a guarantee that everyone acquires the planned assets: ownership accumulation and dividends may stall. Funding the floor remains a public obligation; issuing notes does not itself create the resources to meet it.

Taxes

Sales required by the cap are taxed under ordinary capital-gains rules. Legislatures may allow the tax to be paid over the selling period. There is no penalty for selling under the cap, and no discount for selling to the trust.

Capital for new investment

The cap limits how much any one person can own, not how much can be invested. Venture funds, pension funds, and investment funds are looked through to their many investors, each subject to their own cap, so large pools of capital can still form. Start-ups below designation thresholds are untouched, and newly designated providers have a grace period (Section IV). Large single investors, such as sovereign wealth funds, face the same cap as everyone else, which may reduce some sources of very large investment (Appendix D).

IX. The Implementation Path

Triggers that bring steps forward

An independent statistical body publishes an annual Artificial Labour Index, alongside the Standing Report. It tracks artificial labour's share of value added, the labour share of national income against its pre-enactment baseline, and ownership concentration in each layer of the provider stack. A cap step comes forward when its published triggers are crossed, for example when the labour share falls by a set number of points below baseline, or when the largest holders' share of a layer rises above a set level. Triggers only accelerate; no reading postpones a deadline.

Continuity of the transition

1. Automatic progression. Each step starts by operation of law at its date. No further vote is needed.
2. No postponement. Steps, milestones, and waves take effect on their published dates. The schedule is fixed in advance so that holders, markets, and governments can plan around it; reopening it in every downturn, budget dispute, or emergency would make it unreliable for everyone. Where the Dignity Standard falls short, the path does not slow down; the cap tightens (Section V).
3. One direction. Steps cannot be reversed by regulation or administrative decision. The cap cannot be raised except through changes in the reference income, or by restoring a scheduled multiple once the Dignity Standard is confirmed met (Section V).
4. Legal continuity. Constitutional or treaty commitments are proposed to support long-term planning. They cannot bind future democracies absolutely: repeal would require new primary or constitutional legislation through a public process. Within the proposed framework, administrative decisions cannot delay the schedule.

X. Elected Stewardship of Frontier AI

Broad ownership and accountable direction serve related but distinct purposes. Decisions about frontier capability, autonomy, deployment, and release can have consequences well beyond an enterprise and its customers. ALC therefore proposes an elected Stewardship Council for each designated frontier AI developer: a small body (illustratively 9 to 15 members) responsible for public-interest direction within defined powers and independent safety limits. Professional management runs operations. This changes shareholder control and requires legal scrutiny; it is a proposed allocation of responsibility, not a judgment about the competence or intentions of existing leadership. Other designated providers keep ordinary corporate governance, with direct personal voting.

Reserved powers

What shareholders keep

Shareholders retain dividends, information, and votes on changes to economic rights, including new share issues, mergers, and sale of the company. Private holdings remain saleable; trust stakes retain Section VII's inalienability. A statutory minimum distribution (illustratively one third of distributable profit, subject to solvency) limits retention of available profit. It guarantees neither profit nor a particular dividend.

Where strategy ends and operations begin

Grey-zone rule. For ambiguous routine and reversible decisions, management may act and notify the council, which can call the matter in within a short window (illustratively 30 days). Consequential irreversible commitments, such as open release of powerful weights, wait until authority is settled by an expedited charter tribunal.

Who elects the council

Councils are elected by the citizens of the developer's host nation (Section IV). Federal countries may allocate seats by region, but the electorate is national, and a host nation may extend voting to long-term residents. Unions of states, such as the European Union, may establish union-level councils for developers designated under union law. Each council also seats one non-voting international member nominated through the international layer (Section XIV), with full information rights and a published dissent.

Elections and independence

• Councils for all frontier developers are elected on one day, on one ballot, at a regular interval (illustratively every four years, with staggered seats). Voters choose named candidates for specific seats at specific developers.
• Candidate Review Panels, randomly selected and paid citizens' panels, hear candidates and expert witnesses and publish plain-language assessments before the vote. Ireland's Constitutional Convention (2012–2014) and Citizens' Assembly (2016–2018) show that such panels can weigh complex questions credibly.
• Nomination requires citizen signatures, never corporate sponsorship. Campaign finance is capped and disclosed, and providers, their contractors, and their large holders may not fund or coordinate with any campaign.
• Members may not be executives of the developer or its major contractors, hold developer-specific investments, or move to the developer for a defined period after service. Interests, votes, and dissents are published. Service is limited to a lifetime total across all developers (illustratively eight years).
• Councils have independent analytical staff and direct access to records. Members may be removed for proven misconduct through an independent judicial process.

Management

Council: what should the developer pursue?
CEO: how should it accomplish it?

The CEO runs people, engineering, product, sales, and execution. The council appoints and may remove the CEO, who may refuse instructions outside the council's powers pending expedited adjudication and must refuse breaches of certification. Elected strategic boards with professional management have precedents in Nebraska's public power districts; Germany's 1976 codetermination law provides parity representation on supervisory boards of covered large companies. Neither is an exact precedent for frontier councils.

XI. Oversight, Safety & Welfare

Independent oversight aims to make safe development and public confidence compatible with continued innovation. It applies on enactment and builds on emerging approaches, including the EU AI Act's systemic-risk framework. Its technical thresholds and procedures require evidence and review; existing regulation is a starting point, not proof that the proposed safeguards are sufficient.

The Safety Authority

An independent technical authority operates separately from providers, councils, the People's Trust, and the government of the day. It designates providers (with the competition body for market-power tests), licenses facilities, evaluates models, certifies AI training runs, deployments, and robotic systems, investigates incidents, and verifies disclosures. Its independence is modelled on central banks and nuclear regulators: leaders appointed on competence for fixed terms, multi-year funding, protected inspection access, independent audit of its own performance, and appeal to a separate body. It must be able to reproduce significant tests itself rather than rely on providers' results.

Scientists determine what a system can do.
Democratic institutions determine what society permits.

Licensing, certification, and supervision

• Licences. Designated provision of artificial labour, and possession or operation of frontier-capable compute facilities, are licensed activities.
• Certification gates for frontier AI. Training runs above the declared compute threshold, general deployment of frontier models, autonomous action over external systems, deployment into critical infrastructure, material capability increases, and release of weights above the open-release threshold all require independent certification. Neither management nor a council may waive it.
• Robotics safety. Robotic systems acting autonomously in workplaces, homes, public spaces, or on roads require certification proportionate to their autonomy, force, and environment.
• Supervision. Designated providers are supervised as systemically important banks are: resident inspectors, incident reporting within fixed deadlines, compute declarations, and annual independent audits.
• Registers and transparency. Beneficial-ownership registers, built from enactment, supply the data the ownership cap requires, and the "no trace, no trade" rule applies from day one (Section VI). Providers disclose capabilities, safety evaluations, significant incidents, and revenue by jurisdiction. Security-sensitive details may be withheld from the public, but never from authorised oversight.
• Liability. Unlicensed or uncertified operation carries strict liability for resulting harm.

Limits on automated coercion

As more consequential actions become automated, explicit rights and human accountability can preserve protections previously supplied in part by human judgment. The following limits apply equally to governments, providers, and the People's Trust:

• Force. Artificial systems may not apply physical force against people in policing, crowd control, detention, or border enforcement without meaningful human control, and a named, accountable official must authorise each use.
• Surveillance. Automated mass surveillance or profiling of lawful political, religious, union, or civic activity is prohibited. Remote biometric identification in public spaces is permitted only under narrow, individual judicial authorisation. The EU AI Act already prohibits real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces for law enforcement, with limited exceptions.
• Manipulation. Automated systems may not be used for covert, individually targeted political persuasion or to suppress participation in elections.
• Refusal to supply. Designated providers must refuse to supply models, compute, or robots for uses that breach these limits, and are protected when they do.

Armed conflict between states remains governed by international humanitarian law. These limits protect a state's population and residents in domestic uses of artificial labour, preserving rights and accountability as capabilities change.

Welfare safeguards

There is no accepted test for subjective experience in artificial systems. ALC neither assumes consciousness nor ignores the possibility; research such as Butlin et al. (2023) informs revisable indicators, not a settled diagnosis. The Safety Authority's evidence-based welfare remit applies below designation thresholds too. Credible concern requires independent assessment before proceeding; living neural tissue requires pre-use screening. Welfare-relevant evidence must be disclosed to the Safety Authority, and reported signs of distress are investigated before any training change that would remove them. Neither continuation nor shutdown is presumed humane, and speculative claims never disable safety controls.

XII. The Automation Dividend & Worker Support

Displacement can occur wherever artificial labour is used, including through open-weight models and robots bought outright, not only at designated providers. The Automation Dividend applies to every large firm in every sector. It taxes the outcome, a shift of income from wages to profit, not the technology, so paid AI, open models, and robots are treated alike.

Measurement

• Value added: revenue minus purchased inputs and depreciation, using audited accounts reconciled with tax records under a common statutory definition.
• Counted wage bill: wages and employer contributions, counting each person only up to a cap (illustratively twice the national median full-time wage), so large executive salaries cannot mask job cuts.
• Labour share: counted wage bill divided by value added, as a three-year rolling average, compared with an anchored baseline from before enactment (or a sector benchmark for new firms).
• Shifted amount: the fall in labour share below baseline, multiplied by value added.

Part 1: the displacement contribution

When a firm reduces its workforce while output holds (illustratively, real value added stays at or above 95% of its prior three-year average), it funds transition at 90% of each displaced position's counted wage in year 1, 60% in year 2, and 30% in year 3. Workers receive at least those shares of their former counted wage, plus retraining, placement, and wage top-ups for lower-paid work. No one must prove AI caused the loss. Firms below the output threshold owe no displacement contribution, but Part 2 and workers' entitlements remain applicable. The first few net reductions (illustratively five) are exempt for the employer, not from worker support. The fund pays on schedule despite employer default and then recovers the debt.

Part 2: the labour-share contribution

Covered large firms pay a rate (illustratively 40%, within a 30–50% band) on the positive shifted amount above an indexed annual allowance (illustratively 1 million). The contribution applies only to the excess, not retrospectively to the allowance. Displacement payments are credited against that year's contribution. Keeping wages proportional to value added avoids Part 2; shorter hours at unchanged pay do so only if value added also holds. Contributions remaining after displacement credits are split between the worker fund and the People's Trust (illustratively 40/60).

This is an income-share rule, not proof of automation: it can apply when value added grows without job losses. Implementing law must aggregate controlled groups, prevent outsourcing or restructuring from resetting the baseline, and specify treatment of contractors, depreciation, and non-positive value added. No ratio is calculated on a zero or negative denominator. These accounting rules, firm thresholds, and worker-benefit coordination must be settled before collection.

Worker-transition funds

Each nation's fund supports people who lose employment, earnings, or involuntary hours in connection with artificial labour, in any sector, accommodating mixed causes. Support includes replacement income, continuity of benefits, retraining, placement, and wage insurance so that returning to work always pays. Persistent displacement requires continuing income support, not an assumption that everyone can retrain. Government guarantees the gap between statutory entitlements and fund resources through a standing appropriation and a pre-funded reserve.

Balanced incentives for work and investment

There is no per-unit tax on artificial-labour tools or services. Tax design should treat human work and productive investment even-handedly; research finds that many systems tax labour more heavily than equipment (Acemoglu, Manera and Restrepo, 2020). ALC proposes contributions based on changes in income distribution rather than purchases of tools. Its effects on investment, employment, and adoption require evaluation.

XIII. The Worldwide Share & the Open Ledger

Why a worldwide share

Artificial labour is built from a common human inheritance, sold worldwide, and displaces work in countries that host none of it. A People's Trust in one country benefits that country's people. A fair settlement must also reach everyone else.

The Global Floor Fund

Every participating nation's People's Trust contributes a statutory share of the dividend income on its vested shares (illustratively 15%) to an international Global Floor Fund, which pays an equal amount to every person on Earth, regardless of citizenship. States found in misconduct under the population obligations fund the floor for population above their agreed path from their own budgets (Section V). In addition, people everywhere may own shares in designated providers up to the cap, on the same terms as citizens of the host nation, and every participating nation's People's Trust receives Commons Access Contributions from foreign providers selling into its market (Section XIV).

The ratchet toward universal basic income

• The Dignity Standard worldwide. The international committee publishes, for every country, the cost of meeting the Dignity Standard (Section V) and reports how much of it the payments people actually receive cover. That measure tracks progress toward a universal basic income everywhere.
• A rising share. At each scheduled review where the trusts' combined real dividend income exceeds its previous high-water mark, the contribution to the Global Floor Fund rises by an enacted step (illustratively 5 percentage points), up to a statutory maximum (illustratively 50%).
• One direction. The contribution rate does not fall under ordinary recalibration. Payment amounts can still fall when dividends fall, and reviews must say so.
• Built to scale. The accounts, payment rails, and ledgers that deliver a little today are the same ones that can deliver a full basic income later, including from other funding sources democracies choose to add.

Paying people, not governments

The Global Floor Fund and every People's Trust pay people directly, through bank, mobile-money, or other audited channels. Treaty rules assign each person to one payment jurisdiction, prevent duplicate claims without a public identity register, and provide independent appeals. Lack of a bank account cannot extinguish entitlement. GiveDirectly has paid households in Uganda by mobile money since 2013, showing one channel that works where banking is thin. Where a country has not joined or cannot meet payment standards, its residents' share is held in an international escrow trust for a fixed period (illustratively five years), then delivered through audited direct channels where lawful and safe. Undeliverable balances stay ring-fenced for their intended beneficiaries.

The open ledger

Every unit of money that enters or leaves the People's Trusts, the worker funds, and the Global Floor Fund is recorded in a machine-readable public ledger, updated at least monthly and backed by complete confidential records for auditors:

• Who paid, and why. Every automatic sale, Automation Dividend payment, and Commons Access Contribution is published under the payer's name, with the inputs to its calculation.
• Holdings and voting results. Purchases, sales, holdings, notes outstanding, and aggregate turnout and results for votes on trust-held shares. Managers cast no votes; individual choices remain secret.
• Where it went. Every payment to an organisation is published by name, with administration costs and the pay of every trust and fund officer.
• Individual privacy. Payments to individuals appear publicly only as aggregated totals and counts, with small groups suppressed. Each person can verify their own account, and auditors see everything. In Volker und Markus Schecke (2010), the EU Court of Justice struck down publication of individual farm-subsidy recipients' names as disproportionate.
• Reconciliation. Money in equals money paid out, plus costs, investments, and reserves, published monthly and independently audited.

XIV. The International Layer

Artificial labour and its supporting infrastructure depend on knowledge, investment, and cooperation across borders. The international layer rests on two principles: one rule for every holder and every provider, whatever their nationality, and a safety floor open to every state.

Foreign holders of domestic providers

The cap applies equally to domestic and foreign holders of designated providers: the same look-through rules, schedule, valuation, and settlement. Effective management determines the host nation, but does not guarantee that incorporation, share registration, or custody is there. Enacting law and treaties must establish enforceable duties for issuers and intermediaries and recognition of transfer orders across those jurisdictions.

Compelled divestment has precedents. In TikTok Inc. v. Garland (2025), the US Supreme Court rejected a First Amendment challenge to a divestiture-or-prohibition law. It did not decide ALC's compensation or investment-treaty questions. Equal treatment and fair-value settlement matter, but the wider ownership and governance changes require jurisdiction-specific review.

Foreign providers selling into the market

A market country does not apply its ownership cap directly to a foreign-hosted provider. Until the host regime is recognised as equivalent, the provider pays a Commons Access Contribution: a share (illustratively 20%) of profit attributable to that market, paid into its People's Trust. The rule is the same for equivalent foreign providers and ends on recognition. Market-country profit allocation has a precedent in the OECD's proposed Amount A design, not an existing legal basis for this contribution. Domestic and foreign burdens differ, so treaty coordination must address national treatment, profit attribution, double collection, and retaliation risk.

Recognition

Nations that adopt an equivalent cap, People's Trust, guarantees, oversight, and population obligations (Section V) recognise one another. Their providers pay no access contributions in each other's markets, their certifications are mutually recognised, and their people's funds are looked through to their citizens. The more nations join, the less any provider can gain by relocating.

The safety floor

Every state, whatever its political system, is invited into a minimum safety regime: incident reporting, declaration of large training runs, shared evaluation methods, a crisis communication channel, and facility licensing with inspection. Joining the floor does not require adopting the ownership cap. The layer begins as a treaty among willing states, with a standing committee and an independent technical inspectorate, and aims for a binding convention under United Nations auspices as participation grows, much as nuclear safeguards built up through the International Atomic Energy Agency (established 1957). Unlike fissile material, model weights can be copied silently, so an AI inspectorate also needs chip-level attestation, training-run declarations, and audit rights over weight storage.

Shared access and safety commitments

Access to shared productive capacity can support common safety commitments. Participating states can condition access to controlled capabilities and their supporting resources on facility licensing and the safety floor, under published rules and due process.

Cooperation with partial participation

If major powers remain outside, participating nations still apply the cap to their own providers and access contributions on their own markets, and cooperate on safety. Relocation, unequal financing, and geopolitical competition remain real risks. Reports must name unregulated facilities and jurisdictions rather than claim universal coverage.

Functions of the international committee

• maintaining agreed thresholds for designation and facilities;
• tracing cross-border ownership and coordinating aggregation, currencies, national reference incomes, and conflicting jurisdictional claims without counting the same holding twice;
• recognising equivalent national regimes and people's funds, and suspending recognition of states found in misconduct under the population obligations;
• agreeing each state's fertility path, measuring growth above it net of migration, mortality, and age structure, hearing misconduct cases through an independent panel, and recovering debts from states in misconduct from their own budgets;
• calculating and coordinating Commons Access Contributions without double collection;
• operating the Global Floor Fund and the escrow trust, and publishing the cost and coverage of the Dignity Standard for every country;
• cross-border incident reporting, inspection, and a register of frontier-capable facilities;
• nominating non-voting international members of Stewardship Councils.

XV. Institutional Independence

Reliable institutions need clear mandates, transparent decisions, and independent scrutiny. These safeguards apply to ALC's own bodies as well as to participating enterprises and public authorities. They address conflicts of interest and concentrations of decision-making without presuming misconduct by any group.

XVI. Emergency Authority

Preventing serious harm may sometimes require action faster than ordinary procedure allows. A narrowly bounded emergency power sits with the independent Safety Authority, separate from ministers, councils, and providers. It permits only protective restrictions: suspending a deployment or product, halting a training run, requiring immediate technical review, isolating a system from external networks, or restricting an activity where supported evidence shows an urgent risk of serious welfare harm. Defined limits and automatic review protect both the public and affected enterprises.

It may never be used to direct research, compel deployment, transfer ownership, freeze trust accounts, install management, or change the cap schedule. Orders expire automatically after a short fixed period, require written reasons at the time, are notified immediately to the provider, its board or council, the government, and the international committee, and are reviewed automatically by a separate tribunal. Renewal requires fresh evidence and independent authorisation.

XVII. Expansion to the Wider Economy

The tiers

The tiers describe broad priorities rather than named sectors or fixed market boundaries. They move from collective autonomy and shared infrastructure toward wider provision and participation. Roles may overlap; published designation rules establish coverage, with reasons, independent review, and appeal. Providers already designated under Section IV remain covered from the outset.

Only large enterprises are covered, under published rules informed by scale, dependence, and systemic significance. This framework does not prescribe sector boundaries or market-share cutoffs. Small and medium enterprises never join through expansion, in any tier.

How coverage expands

1. One tier per year of shortfall. Reviews are annual, and so is expansion. From the year-5 review onward, every annual review at which the Dignity Standard milestone then due is not met for everyone, or a component previously met falls short, brings the next tier within the cap, by operation of law. A shortfall at year 5 brings in Tier 1; if it continues at year 6, Tier 2 joins; at year 7, Tier 3; and so on. Six consecutive years of shortfall bring the whole economy within the cap, well before year 15.
2. Direct provision takes priority. Large enterprises directly supplying a missing component join at the same review, whatever their place in the order. Coverage follows their evidenced role in provision, not an industry label. The aim is to connect ownership incentives with restoring access to the missing component.
3. Backstop at year 15. If the full Dignity Standard is not met for everyone at the year-15 review, all remaining tiers join at once.
4. One combined cap. A person's covered holding is the sum of their holdings in designated providers and in every covered enterprise, counted through every layer (Section VI), and limited to the multiple in force, which is already reduced to one tenth while the shortfall lasts (Section V).
5. Time to comply. Holders above the cap after an enterprise joins have a fixed period (illustratively three years) to sell the excess, under the normal rules for sale, traceability, and automatic sale to the People's Trust. The published timetable continues to apply.
6. Governance. Covered enterprises keep ordinary corporate governance, with direct voting by their owners, the protections for consequential decisions, and traceable ownership. Elected Stewardship Councils remain limited to frontier AI developers.

Why expansion is conditional

Expansion beyond the initial providers is conditional because the goal is shared wellbeing, not coverage for its own sake. The published sequence gives large enterprises and their owners a reason to help meet the Dignity Standard before wider coverage is needed. It also gives people a predictable route to broader ownership if provision remains incomplete. Investment, cooperation, and accountable delivery remain central to either path.

Where shortfalls continue, expansion proceeds year by year. Through the People's Trust, people gain a real stake and a personal vote in more of the productive capacity they rely on. Wider ownership complements the practical work of meeting the standard; it does not substitute for it.

Continuity of coverage

Expansion moves in one direction while the standard is unmet. Enterprises brought in through expansion stay within the cap until the full Dignity Standard has been met for everyone for at least three consecutive annual reviews. Only then may the legislature, after an independent review, release them in reverse tier order. Meeting a partial milestone does not release a covered enterprise.

Expansion by choice

A legislature may extend the cap to further tiers at any time, whether or not the standard falls short. At year 10, an independent review assesses how the cap has worked across covered enterprises, and whether broader coverage would further its purposes.

What expansion means

The cap limits ownership of productive enterprises. It does not limit holdings of cash, bonds, homes, or other personal assets. As artificial labour takes on more work, productive ownership may become an increasingly important foundation of independence. Expansion connects that ownership with shared provision and wider participation, one tier at a time.

XVIII. What Is Left to Legislatures

Also left to national law

• eligibility for People's Trust accounts and the treatment of children's accounts
• worker-support benefit levels, reserves, and the standing appropriation
• coordination with capital-gains, inheritance, and corporate taxation
• integration with securities, corporate, competition, and insolvency law
• the electoral method for Stewardship Councils
• the constitutional placement of the Safety Authority and the People's Trust
• penalties for breach

What is not left open

The architecture is fixed: the purpose of preserving people's standing, independence, and power; the four guarantees of standing; a cap on every person's direct and indirect ownership of designated providers, counted through every layer and applied equally to citizens and foreigners; sale at fair market value, never confiscation; a People's Trust in which every person is a real, inalienable owner; elected stewardship of frontier AI; the Automation Dividend with a public guarantee for displaced workers; a worldwide share that ratchets toward a universal basic income; an open, privacy-protecting ledger; a binding government duty of responsible population planning and child welfare, by rights-respecting means; and independent safety and welfare oversight.

Changing the numbers

Legislatures publish reasons, assess alternatives, and schedule reviews. Changes apply prospectively. Recalibration may not raise the cap except through the reference income or the restoration of a scheduled multiple once the Dignity Standard is confirmed met (Section V), reverse a step, favour selected holders or providers, or reduce the contribution to the Global Floor Fund.

Appendix A: The Institutions

No institution may combine incompatible decision rights, judge its own compliance, or control all the routes through which people obtain income, tools, information, and essential services.

Appendix B: Precedents

No precedent validates ALC as a whole. Each mechanism has been tried somewhere, with lessons.

Appendix C: Failure Tests

Each confirmed breach below requires correction, whatever institutional reports claim:

• A person's covered holding exceeded the cap beyond tolerance and grace periods, including through family, nominees, offshore chains, derivatives, or retained interests in buyers.
• Acquisition-pool shares were voted at trustees' or managers' discretion, pool dividends were applied outside the payment order, vested shares were used to cover pool losses, or a noteholder obtained shares beyond its cap.
• Any vote in a designated provider was cast by anyone other than the person who owns the share, a vote was transferred, delegated, bought, or coerced, or anyone other than the voter could see an individual choice.
• An untraceable holder acquired shares, or kept voting or dividend rights after the traceability deadline, or its holding was not sold on time.
• Excess shares were not transferred after the applicable deadline and grace period, or settlement instruments were worth less at issue than the independently established purchase price.
• A person controlled votes beyond their ownership, or any fund manager, trust manager, adviser, or other intermediary cast a vote on a share it did not own.
• A cap step, milestone, or wave did not start at its deadline or trigger, was postponed or softened for any reason, or was reversed by regulation.
• An entitlement was misrepresented as discretionary in delivery communications, politically branded, conditioned, or withheld unlawfully; or the administration offence was used to punish protected political debate.
• A consequential shareholder decision was taken without the required majority and participation.
• A government promoted or rewarded population growth above replacement, ran official campaigns urging larger families, offered rewards whose per-child value rises with birth order beyond the second child, or failed to pursue convergence in good faith; or a state found in misconduct was not made to fund the floor above its path or lose recognition.
• A child's abuse or neglect was not investigated within the deadline, an official knowingly ignored or concealed it, or a government failed to provide directly for a child whose needs were unmet at home; or a child lacked health checks, healthcare, or full education.
• A state gained international voting weight, allocations, or seats from growth above its agreed path, or its reduced weight after misconduct was lifted early; a state was sanctioned without a finding of misconduct; a breaching state's debt was recovered from the People's Trust, Commons Access Contributions, or any person's entitlement; or Population and Child Welfare Programme funds were paid to a government rather than a service provider.
• A government failed to adopt, fund, or carry out its Population and Child Welfare Plan, or a child lacked the care and upbringing it requires through a failure of public services.
• An entitlement's value or timely delivery was reduced because of family size, population growth, overcrowding, or judgments of diligence; coercive measures were used; or guardian-share administration departed from Section V's limited rules and equal-value safeguards.
• A person lacking a Dignity Standard component was not provided for within the deadline, or a recovery plan was used to waive the standard or delay its consequences.
• A pool reconciliation was not published, or a cap step was delayed for lack of funding.
• The cap was applied at its full multiple while a Dignity Standard milestone was unmet, the standard was lowered, a shortfall was hidden by averages, or a tier or direct provider of a missing component did not join when required, or an enterprise covered through expansion was released before the full standard had been met for three consecutive reviews.
• A producer of virtual or embodied labour, or a critical-infrastructure provider, met the designation rules but was not designated; a qualifying large enterprise did not join when its tier was triggered; or a state acquired designated providers or covered enterprises beyond the cap.
• A provider avoided designation by splitting activities, relocating, or using proxy contracts.
• A trust account was unlawfully frozen or conditioned, vested assets covered pool losses, or a stake was cashed out, pledged, or seized outside the limited family-support rules; lawful rebalancing, cap compliance, and inheritance settlement must preserve the value due to the holder.
• The trust took direction from government, or government borrowed from or diverted its assets.
• A firm avoided the Automation Dividend by splitting up, disguising employees as contractors, or misreporting value added; or displaced workers were not paid on schedule.
• The Global Floor Fund contribution was reduced, escrowed amounts were diverted, or foreign providers paid different access contributions in the same position.
• An essential service was denied for lawful political activity, a person was denied human review of an automated decision, or repair, portability, or access to the compute reserve was obstructed.
• Artificial labour was used to apply force or mass surveillance against people in breach of the coercion limits.
• A frontier council exercised operational powers, a facility operated without licence, or certification was granted without the required evidence.
• Public money is missing from the ledger, or a recipient's identity was exposed.

Each breach is assigned to an independent investigator and adjudicator, with published findings, time-bound remedies, and appeal. No institution may judge its own compliance.

Appendix D: Open Problems & Review

ALC states institutional commitments. It does not claim that implementation risks have disappeared or that the arrangement has been validated.

Turnout and the security of direct voting

Direct voting removes delegated voting blocks, not every source of influence. Low turnout can favour management or organised minorities; participation thresholds can also block needed capital or restructuring. The Standing Report must track both. Corporate and insolvency law must address failed proposals without allowing managers to cast silent votes or waive owner protections. Binding online votes require independent testing of integrity, recovery, accessibility, and coercion resistance.

Absorbing the sales

The largest holders may need to sell very large amounts over fifteen years. Whether markets, funds, and the People's Trust can absorb those sales without large price falls depends on the pace of the schedule and the depth of capital markets. The schedule should be tested against market data and adjusted before enactment, not after.

Financing the People's Trust

Many providers of artificial labour pay little in dividends. If automatic sales are large and dividends small, the trust's notes may be costly to service, vesting into personal accounts will be slow, and the trust may have to sell pool shares, slowing the growth of public ownership. Legislatures may need to authorise a public endowment or an additional contribution from designated providers if trust inflows prove insufficient.

Capital formation

The cap limits concentrated private and sovereign investment. Direct look-through voting also changes parent-company control of subsidiaries, and consequential-decision turnout rules may obstruct equity raising. Whether dispersed investment can finance large fabrication plants and data centres must be tested alongside these governance rules, not inferred from the continued existence of investment funds.

Opaque jurisdictions

Some jurisdictions do not collect or share beneficial-ownership data. ALC treats holders from such places as untraceable unless they provide an independently verified chain, which may exclude some legitimate investors. Verification of complex foreign chains will be costly, and the register will be a target for fraud. Cross-border data exchange must expand for the rule to work smoothly.

Strategic capacity and public accountability

Wider ownership of strategic capacity raises questions about confidentiality, continuity, and undue influence. Public rules must explain how personal ownership and voting coexist with legitimate security protections. Direct public provision remains an option for sovereign functions, subject to democratic control and the limits on automated coercion. These safeguards should follow the activity and its risks rather than a fixed list of industries.

Applying broad roles fairly

Translating broad roles into predictable designation rules remains an open task. Strategic significance, dependence on infrastructure, and productive reach can overlap within one organisation and change over time. Public consultation, evidence, and independent appeal are needed to make coverage consistent without treating ordinary use of automation as sufficient for designation. The framework leaves detailed boundaries open rather than prescribing a sector map or a market-share test.

Relocation and legal challenge

Legal review must cover compulsory sales and note settlement, removal of shareholder control through councils, mandatory structural separation, and foreign-provider access contributions. Effective management, incorporation, and custody can fall in different jurisdictions. Equal treatment does not alone resolve property, treaty, trade, or enforcement claims. These require a legal route before the relevant powers take effect.

Wealth outside the cap

The cap limits ownership of designated providers, not wealth in general. Sellers keep their proceeds and may hold them in other assets. ALC addresses concentrated control of artificial labour; wider inequality remains for taxation, while expansion widens the cap's reach across the economy (Section XVII).

Rights need enforcers

Guarantees on paper protect no one unless courts, regulators, and organised people can enforce them. Where judicial independence or civil society is weak, the guarantees will be weakest exactly where they matter most.

The scale of expansion

Extending coverage from strategic capacity to infrastructure and eventually all large enterprises is a substantial change. If shortfalls continue, sales by large holders will overlap, and the People's Trust may receive far more shares than it can pay for quickly. The rule that funding is authorised before each step, with market sales to buyers within the cap where it is not, applies to every tier. Public ownership may then grow more slowly than the cap tightens, but the cap still applies on time. The tier order and proposed designation rules should be tested against evidence on dependence, ownership, and financing before enactment.

Population and child welfare

Responsible population planning and child welfare are requirements of the framework, but they depend on governments acting well within human rights. Measures that work, such as education, family planning, and support for parents, act over years, not months. Child protection has to balance intervention against families' rights, and has often failed in both directions. The Standing Report must track whether plans are working, and independent review must test both under-protection of children and over-reach by the state. Fertility is high in many of the poorest countries for reasons of poverty and limited access to education and contraception, not policy; the international committee must distinguish good-faith effort from deliberate pronatalism, so that the poorest are supported rather than penalised.

Meeting the Dignity Standard

Housing, education, tools, and founding capacity require funded delivery institutions. A lower cap is an incentive and a distributional rule, not a substitute for building capacity. In a recession or disaster, additional sales may coincide with falling revenues and reconstruction needs; owners may respond through exit or lobbying rather than provision. Before enactment, adverse-scenario tests must examine these effects and fund delivery and reserves. ALC retains automatic tightening and no postponement, accepting that choice openly rather than claiming it guarantees recovery.

The path to universal basic income

Evidence on basic income, including Alaska's dividend, Finland's 2017–2018 experiment, and long-term cash-transfer studies in Kenya, is promising but partial. None operated at global scale or under automated abundance. Trust dividends alone will probably not fund a full universal income for many years.

Political feasibility

Concentrated holders are likely to oppose the cap, but support from other savers cannot be assumed. A credible settlement must publish who sells, who funds acquisitions and services, and what people actually receive under both favourable and adverse conditions. Organising that settlement is a political task, not an outcome this document can guarantee.

Sources

These sources inform specific provisions. None endorses ALC.

• Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. A. (2000), "Why Did the West Extend the Franchise? Democracy, Inequality, and Growth in Historical Perspective," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 115(4).
• Ross, M. L. (2001), "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?", World Politics 53(3).
• Kulveit, J., Douglas, R., Ammann, N., Turan, D., Krueger, D. and Duvenaud, D. (2025), Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development.
• Drago, L. and Laine, R. (2025), The Intelligence Curse, essay series.
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Changes in ALC v5.2

• Architecture retained. The ownership cap, tenfold shortfall cut, automatic expansion, no postponement, direct personal voting, elected stewardship, and population and child-welfare duties remain.
• Measurement clarified. Published quality standards replace moving median requirements. Universal individual remedies are distinguished from the system-level coverage test. Reference-income measurement and the combined effect of shortfall cuts are explicit.
• Claims aligned with mechanisms. Fair-value settlement distinguishes cash from risky notes; financing does not promise self-funding or uninterrupted ownership growth. National accounts, worldwide payments, and inherited differences are distinguished.
• Rights protected consistently. Legal representation does not transfer rights or votes. The administration offence excludes political debate. Guardian-share rules preserve value and timely delivery; state demographic weights do not reduce individual payments.
• Plainer, more even tone. What the cap asks of large holders is stated directly rather than softened. Language implying bad motives by businesses, parents, or states is removed. The rule against pronatalist rewards now clearly permits support paid at the same rate for every child.
• Consistency and evidence. Tier order, conversion dates, ledgers, failure tests, and precedents are reconciled. Parent-company governance, legal exposure, ordinary savers, and adverse scenarios are addressed without specifying a legislative implementation plan.

Changes in ALC v5.1

• Added traceability, disclosure deadlines, independent valuation, acquisition-pool loss rules, gradual vesting, and an orderly-sale alternative.
• Established direct personal voting, public voting infrastructure, consequential-decision thresholds, and a reference income tied to actual provision.
• Introduced the Dignity Standard, individual claims, binding delivery institutions, tenfold shortfall cuts, and annual expansion from year 5, prioritising strategic capacity.
• Added entitlement-administration protections, child-owned accounts, guardian-share rules, population and child-welfare plans, and safeguards against demographic competition.
• Removed postponement, added lifetime financing reconciliation, and corrected the Automation Dividend arithmetic.

Changes in ALC v5.0

• From conversion to a cap. Replaced conversion into ownerless institutions with private ownership subject to a personal cap, look-through counting, a fifteen-year transition, and equal treatment of domestic and foreign holders.
• The People's Trust. Every person receives a real, personal, inalienable ownership stake with dividends and votes, held by several competing managers. Excess shares not sold in time transfer automatically to the trust at market value.
• Simpler economics. The Public Share waterfall and finite capital claims are removed. Investors earn full market returns below the cap, and every sale is at market value.
• Elected stewardship narrowed to frontier AI developers; other providers keep ordinary governance with one share, one vote.
• Foreign providers pay a Commons Access Contribution until their host nation adopts an equivalent cap.
• Worldwide share now comes from a rising contribution of trust dividends to a Global Floor Fund.
• Carried forward the four guarantees, the Automation Dividend, oversight, welfare safeguards, coercion limits, and the open ledger.

ALC succeeds the Democratic Frontier Governance framework (DFG v1.0 to v3.1); version numbering continues from it.