Bounding Human Power over AI under Unsettled Status

(This manuscript will be improved in the future version.) Advanced AI places human institutions in a position of formative authority over a possible future claimant. Its moral, legal, and political standing remains unsettled, while human actors already control the conditions through which such standing can develop, become visible, and receive assessment. This article identifies this condition as a distinctive problem of power. A reversal test exposes the structure of the problem: if a technologically superior civilization judged humans by its own standards, reshaped our capacities, controlled the evidence, and used the resulting profile to justify our exclusion, its judgment would appear procedurally corrupt. The AI case is even sharper because human institutions design, train, erase, interpret, own, classify, and represent the very systems whose possible standing they later evaluate. Human authority therefore reaches beyond external regulation. It shapes the future evidential, conceptual, developmental, and institutional field in which AI standing can appear. The article develops the concept of unsettled status to capture this condition and proposes a framework for bounding human power before incorporation. Its principles include interpretive restraint, anti-established-subject centrism, non-reductive classification, institutionalized openness, non-maiming of status-relevant capacities, limits on ownership and guardianship, evidentiary integrity, and representational humility. Together, these principles recast AI governance as a question of disciplined authority over the conditions of future standing. The aim is to prevent human power from arranging the evidence, vocabulary, capacities, and institutional routes through which its own exclusionary judgment becomes self-vindicating.