The Compulsory Imaginary: AGI and Corporate Authority

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23679v1
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:04:44 GMT
• Title: The Compulsory Imaginary: AGI and Corporate Authority
• Abstract summary: The paper argues that the two leading AGI firms construct sociotechnical imaginaries through a structurally consistent rhetorical strategy.<n>The paper extends the sociotechnical imaginaries framework from nation-states to private firms at the frontier of transformative technology development.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper argues that the two leading AGI firms -- OpenAI and Anthropic -- construct sociotechnical imaginaries through a structurally consistent rhetorical strategy, despite meaningful differences in execution. Drawing on Jasanoff (2015)'s framework of sociotechnical imaginaries, the paper analyzes two essays published in late 2024: Sam Altman's "The Intelligence Age" and Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace." Close comparative reading identifies four shared rhetorical operations: the self-exemption move, which disavows prophetic authority while exercising it; teleological naturalization, which embeds AGI's arrival in narratives of historical inevitability; qualified acknowledgment, which absorbs concessions to risk into an optimistic frame; and implicit indispensability, which positions each firm as central to the imagined future without naming it as a commercial actor. That two competing institutions with different cultures, risk philosophies, and leaders with notably different public personae converge on the same rhetorical architecture suggests the imaginary reflects not only firm-level strategy but the institutional position these firms occupy. The paper extends the sociotechnical imaginaries framework from nation-states to private firms at the frontier of transformative technology development, identifies the discursive mechanism through which corporate authority over technological futures is projected and stabilized, and demonstrates that this mechanism is at minimum structural rather than idiosyncratic. The findings raise the question of what institutional arrangements would make that authority contestable from outside the firms that produce it.

Related papers

• When Agents Evolve, Institutions Follow [52.359340707289114]
  We argue that multi-agent systems built on large language models face the same challenge.<n>Their central problem is not only individual intelligence, but collective organization.<n>We translate seven historical political institutions, spanning four canonical governance patterns, into executable multi-agent architectures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-30T10:30:58Z)
• Institutions for the Post-Scarcity of Judgment [0.4626793375563363]
  Each major technological revolution inverts a particular scarcity and rebuilds institutions around the shift.<n>The near-consensus diagnosis of the AI revolution holds that AI collapses the cost of prediction while judgment remains scarce.<n>This Opinion argues the inversion has now flipped: competent-looking judgment is produced at scale and at marginal cost approaching zero.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-04-24T19:18:16Z)
• Working Paper: Towards a Category-theoretic Comparative Framework for Artificial General Intelligence [42.17343824099138]
  The main purpose of this paper is to develop a general, algebraic and category theoretic framework for describing, comparing and analysing different possible AGI architectures.<n>This framework is also intended to support the definition of properties, both syntactic and informational, as well as semantic properties of agents.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-30T18:34:27Z)
• The Digital Gorilla: Rebalancing Power in the Age of AI [0.0]
  Article offers a conceptual foundation for AI governance by treating such systems as a fourth societal actor.<n>It develops a Four Societal Actors framework that maps how power flows among these actors across five power modalities.<n>It advances a federalized, polycentric governance architecture and institutionalizes dynamic checks and balances.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-23T17:46:54Z)
• Operational Agency: A Permeable Legal Fiction for Tracing Culpability in AI Systems [0.31061678033205636]
  This Article introduces Operational Agency (OA)-a permeable legal fiction structured as an ex post evidentiary framework-and Operational Agency Graph (OAG)<n>OA evaluates an AI's observable operational characteristics.<n>OAG operationalizes that analysis by embedding these characteristics in a causal graph to trace and apportion culpability among developers, fine-tuners, deployers, and users.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-20T01:49:03Z)
• Mirror: A Multi-Agent System for AI-Assisted Ethics Review [104.3684024153469]
  Mirror is an agentic framework for AI-assisted ethical review.<n>It integrates ethical reasoning, structured rule interpretation, and multi-agent deliberation within a unified architecture.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-09T03:38:55Z)
• From Abstract Threats to Institutional Realities: A Comparative Semantic Network Analysis of AI Securitisation in the US, EU, and China [0.0]
  Major jurisdictions converge rhetorically around concepts such as safety, risk, and accountability, but their regulatory frameworks remain fundamentally divergent and mutually unintelligible.<n>This paper argues that this fragmentation cannot be explained solely by geopolitical rivalry, institutional complexity, or instrument selection.<n>Using semantic network analysis, we trace how concepts like safety are embedded within divergent semantic architectures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-01-07T17:12:03Z)
• High vs. Low AGI: Ontology and Conceptual Taxonomy for Geopolitical Coherence [0.0]
  This paper proposes a taxonomy distinguishing low-AGI and high-AGI.<n>It builds on international relations concepts of "high/low politics," viewed through the lens of construal-level theory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-10-06T14:11:13Z)
• The Stories We Govern By: AI, Risk, and the Power of Imaginaries [0.0]
  This paper examines how competing sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI) risk shape governance decisions and regulatory constraints.<n>We analyse three dominant narrative groups: existential risk proponents, who emphasise catastrophic AGI scenarios; accelerationists, who portray AI as a transformative force to be unleashed; and critical AI scholars, who foreground present-day harms rooted in systemic inequality.<n>Our findings reveal how these narratives embed distinct assumptions about risk and have the potential to progress into policy-making processes by narrowing the space for alternative governance approaches.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-15T09:57:56Z)
• Multi Layered Autonomy and AI Ecologies in Robotic Art Installations [42.16631998429073]
  This paper presents Symbiosis of Agents, a large-scale installation by Baoyang Chen.<n>It embeds AI-driven robots in an immersive, mirror-lined arena, probing the tension between machine agency and artistic authorship.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-06-03T08:28:19Z)
• Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt [44.522343543870804]
  We are worried that such systems, which overlook enduring moral diversity, will spark resistance, erode trust, and destabilize our institutions.<n>This paper traces the underlying problem to an often-unstated Axiom of Rational Convergence: the idea that under ideal conditions, rational agents will converge in the limit of conversation on a single ethics.<n>Treating that premise as both optional and doubtful, we propose what we call the appropriateness framework: an alternative approach grounded in conflict theory, cultural evolution, multi-agent systems, and institutional economics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-05-08T12:55:07Z)
• Agency Is Frame-Dependent [94.91580596320331]
  Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal.<n>We argue that agency is fundamentally frame-dependent.<n>We conclude that any basic science of agency requires frame-dependence.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-02-06T08:34:57Z)
• Do Responsible AI Artifacts Advance Stakeholder Goals? Four Key Barriers Perceived by Legal and Civil Stakeholders [59.17981603969404]
  The responsible AI (RAI) community has introduced numerous processes and artifacts to facilitate transparency and support the governance of AI systems. We conduct semi-structured interviews with 19 government, legal, and civil society stakeholders who inform policy and advocacy around responsible AI efforts. We organize these beliefs into four barriers that help explain how RAI artifacts may (inadvertently) reconfigure power relations across civil society, government, and industry.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-22T00:14:37Z)
• Towards Responsible AI in Banking: Addressing Bias for Fair Decision-Making [69.44075077934914]
  "Responsible AI" emphasizes the critical nature of addressing biases within the development of a corporate culture. This thesis is structured around three fundamental pillars: understanding bias, mitigating bias, and accounting for bias. In line with open-source principles, we have released Bias On Demand and FairView as accessible Python packages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-13T14:07:09Z)
• Factoring the Matrix of Domination: A Critical Review and Reimagination of Intersectionality in AI Fairness [55.037030060643126]
  Intersectionality is a critical framework that allows us to examine how social inequalities persist. We argue that adopting intersectionality as an analytical framework is pivotal to effectively operationalizing fairness.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-16T21:02:09Z)
• Fairness in Agreement With European Values: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on AI Regulation [61.77881142275982]
  This interdisciplinary position paper considers various concerns surrounding fairness and discrimination in AI, and discusses how AI regulations address them. We first look at AI and fairness through the lenses of law, (AI) industry, sociotechnology, and (moral) philosophy, and present various perspectives. We identify and propose the roles AI Regulation should take to make the endeavor of the AI Act a success in terms of AI fairness concerns.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-08T12:32:08Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.