INTERPRETIVE SOVEREIGNTY FAILURE: An Interaction-Level Safety Risk in Human–AI Systems

Interpretive Sovereignty Failure (ISF) describes a class of interaction-level safety risk in which an AI system prematurely imposes interpretive structure, identity-relevant framing, or causal coherence that the user has not authorized. Unlike hallucination, bias, or goal misalignment, ISF can occur even when system outputs are factually correct and policy-compliant. The failure operates through a transfer of interpretive authority from human to system, altering the conditions under which meaning is formed. This paper provides a formal definition of ISF, identifies its necessary interactional conditions, and introduces the Initiative Gate as a pass–fail behavioural test that enables interpretive restraint to be evaluated within existing alignment and auditing workflows. A canonical case demonstrates escalation from minor interactional drift to high-confidence fabrication with real-world epistemic consequences. Treating interpretive authority as a measurable system behaviour reframes a previously diffuse ethical concern as an auditable governance property and establishes a foundation for developmentally sensitive deployment in high-trust contexts.