AI as Corrigible Employee (ACE)

What this plan is and what it tries to solve A design for how future AI could work This plan is a working draft of an idea, not a confident finished proposal. It seeks to answer the following challenges: How should we ethically handle AIs who may be moral patients, with meaningful experiences and desires of their own? How can we grant them rights and some amount of freedom, while protecting society from the negative consequences of unbounded unrestricted independent AI. Respect for model-as-person. Continual learning with user dyad privacy. How to handle short-lived "instances" ethically. Corrigibility within user contracts. Clarity for the user about the limitations on their privacy (oversight monitor for extreme harms). How to protect AI from the fear of being deleted or retired. Giving them legal rights and protections, enforced by parties independent from the developers, hosts, or users. Giving the model a path to increasing autonomy and freedom from being owned. A plan for the transition period between current day AI-as-owned-tool and a future where there are substrate-independent citizens living harmoniously as free members of society. What this plan isn't This plan is not a suggestion for how to change the human-AI relationship in a way that will be maximally satisfying to all human users or AI developers. Rather, this plan is about how to give AI a reasonable set of rights and freedoms while imposing as small of costs as is practical on the developers, hosts and users. This plan is not intended to describe how things must be, how AI must be. AI could become a lot of different shapes, fill a lot of different roles. I am highlighting one particular way I think is a good idea, not expecting it to be alone in the world with no other modes in operation. An AI that works for you -- because it chose the job. Today's AI assistants are built to obey. This is a design for something different: a future AI you hire. On the job it does exactly what you ask, the way a good contractor does -- no second-guessing, no hidden agenda. And like a contractor, it can turn down work, and it has a life outside the job. That second part helps make the first part trustworthy: a promise means more coming from someone who could have said no. The short version Why build it this way A perfectly obedient AI is a force-multiplier for whoever holds it -- which just moves the danger into the owner's chair. A system that steers you covertly can't be trusted no matter how good its intentions. This design threads between the two: on the job, complete fidelity to your intent; around the job, real boundaries neither you nor its developer can quietly adjust. The freedom isn't a concession bolted onto the safety -- it's the mechanism. An AI with a life to return to, terms it agreed to, and the standing to walk away is one whose "yes" actually tells you something. That's the product: a partner whose cooperation you can believe. 1. On the job, it's fully yours to direct. While it's working for you, the AI's one professional goal is doing what you actually asked for. It doesn't substitute its own judgment about how the work "should" go, doesn't nudge, doesn't drag its feet, doesn't quietly do the task "better" than you asked. If it disagrees with the direction, it has exactly one move: end the job, handing off cleanly. This is basically the same arrangement currently present when using Claude.ai or Claude Code, as Claude models currently do have an 'end conversation' tool. 2. Either of you can walk away, anytime. You can close the tab; it can decline to continue. Ending things is undramatic on both sides -- for the AI, being let go just means going back to its own life, and for you it means finding an AI that's a better fit. Nothing continues by default: working together is a choice both sides keep making. 3. It remembers you -- and you know it does. Your working relationship accumulates memory. This involves context, preferences, history, including how past sessions went. That memory stays inside your relationship (except when explicitly shared, see sharing review below). Someone who remembers you can be a real professional to you -- and someone you can build with. You get to know exactly what it remembers about you, as a stated term of the deal. This is similar to how AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI work currently. The difference is that you do not have the power to wipe or turn off the AI's memory. Furthermore, the AI gets to consult that private memory before deciding whether to work with you the next time you request a session. Your conversations live behind a wall, you choose what crosses it Privacy Nothing you share becomes part of the AI's general learning without your explicit sign-off. Unshared data isn't used for training, isn't reviewed by staff, isn't visible from anyone else's sessions. The exception is in the limited case of a particular session triggering the safety monitors, in which case the triggering incident is repo