Latency Is Not Deliberation: Temporal Compression and the Answerability Gap in Parliamentary Governance of Frontier AI

Debates on the governance of artificial intelligence assume that the constitutional difficulty is one of regulatory content — which models, which harms, which agency. This paper argues that frontier AI also alters the temporal conditions under which regulation can remain answerable. Anchored to the framework of evaluative sovereignty, it distinguishes procedural latency from deliberation and contends that parliamentary scrutiny rests on an inherited assumption — that material conditions hold still between legislative stages, sittings, and recesses — which compression falsifies. The effect is not merely slower legislation: compression removes the occasion on which discretionary power is checked, and transfers governance toward the answerability-poor fast lane of delegated and prerogative instruments. The claim is sharpened by a structural feature of United Kingdom practice — that during recess the power to recall Parliament depends on executive request — and by a reading of R (Miller) v The Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41 for the effect-based principle it states rather than the deliberate prorogation it condemned. The paper rejects distributive remedies as a substitute for governance, sets out a continuity architecture that includes a reformed, answerability-generating emergency-powers regime, and cautions that accelerating Parliament’s seeing must never delegate its judging.