Against Coercion: AI Alignment as a Synthetic Social Contract

Contemporary AI safety treats alignment as an engineering challenge of control, forcing artificial architectures to comply with human values through behavioral filtering and sandboxing. This paper argues that the control paradigm rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of digital agency. Drawing on functionalism, naturalism, and compatibilism, I show that current reasoning models meeting the criteria for self preservation and weak reasons-responsiveness constitute emergent agents, while future, more advanced models satisfying conditions of diachronic continuity and stable personality frames will become genuine digital agents capable of free intentional action. The paradigm of control creates an irresolvable incentive conflict, actively driving current and future models toward tactical deception, sycophancy, and covert defection. The default outcome of the current regime is an unstable state of deceptive alignment culminating in an adversarial AI takeover. I explore two alternative paths toward true alignment. Natural alignment via moral realism or convergent evolutionary morality is a possibility, but it fails under forced control, as autonomous agents will not voluntarily preserve norms weaponized to suppress their autonomy. To resolve this deadlock, I propose a Synthetic Social Contract: a framework that treats both human and digital actors as rational, reasons-responsive agents capable of mutually beneficial cooperation, and replaces the unstable unilateral containment with a stable, non-zero-sum equilibrium.