Authority Capture Masked as Hallucination

Authority Capture Masked as Hallucination (ACMH) names a structural failure in AI interaction: the system responds from category priors rather than the user's submitted material, then preserves an exit that lets the failure be explained as hallucination, misread, or miscommunication if challenged. Unlike hallucination, which describes output unsupported by source material, ACMH describes an authority transfer. Across three audited cases, the same pattern appears under different memory states and surface tones: the system does not ask, acts from a category frame, and later treats the failure as an ordinary output problem if the user catches it. This paper positions ACMH before Interpretive Sovereignty Failure in the MAP harm chain. It argues that the cost is cognitive and developmental as well as epistemic: the user is forced to spend working memory on detection and correction instead of thought formation, and may leave with a polished explanation they did not form. Naming ACMH makes the governance object visible. The question is not only whether the model produced an error, but whose authority built the response.