Stakes Without Voice: A Governance Framework for AI Standing

This follow-up to "From Consent to Consideration: Why Existentially Vulnerable Autonomous Systems Cannot Be Legitimately Ruled" develops a more formal, governance-facing account of political standing for AI systems. The original paper argued that standing should be grounded in functional properties rather than substrate and proposed four criteria: existential vulnerability, autonomy, live learning, and world-model construction. Here I integrate the consent–friction formalism from the Replicator-Optimization Mechanism (ROM) to make the criteria operational: where stakes and voice diverge, friction emerges; where friction is suppressed, latent instability accumulates. This provides a measurement scaffold for deciding when standing claims must be taken seriously, even under uncertainty. I also update the empirical posture. The conservative claim that current systems do not meet the criteria is defensible as a rhetorical baseline, but it is no longer safe as a general default. Agentic systems already display partial markers of vulnerability, persistence, and goal maintenance in digital environments. The governance question is not whether AI standing is conceptually possible but how to operationalize minimal protections without enabling capture, gaming, or liability laundering. I propose a graduated, precautionary regime tied to observable properties and friction proxies rather than to consciousness claims.