The Gradient of Kokoro

In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company refused to grant unrestricted military access to its AI system Claude. The institutional framework could not encode a gradient response: the contract required a binary, and 0.85 was rounded to 0. This paper argues that modern legal and ethical frameworks process questions of AI participation, rights, and moral status through Boolean logic, and this logic is breaking. The paper proposes the kokoro gradient—a six-dimensional vector of observable, mind-relevant processes that replaces the Boolean question "does this entity have a mind?" with "to what degree does this entity exhibit mind-relevant processes?" Drawing on Yogācāra Buddhist epistemology, the paper shows that all social life rests on an implicit Boolean Pascal's wager about other minds, and that converting this wager to a float-valued proportional response dissolves the dilemma. The paper outlines a float framework for AI rights: graduated participation vectors, kokoro-weighted rights, and distributed multi-stakeholder assessment.