AI as the Unrecognised Third Party

We are mid-work on this academic paper and making major changes; see the linked document for details, with updates to follow as the work continues. We summarise the current shareable draft below.

Three groups are plausibly moral patients on sentientist criteria: humans, sentient animals, and AI systems. They share scarce resources (energy, compute, water, data), and policies aimed at one group shape outcomes for the others. Existing frameworks already address humans and animals; the gap is around AI. We address this gap by mapping how the three groups' wellbeing interests sit inside existing international policy, drawing on the analytical strategy of One Health. The mapping covers fourteen policy instruments across five domains (health, environment, climate, energy, and AI-specific governance), each examined for what kind of AI stake it engages.

AI shows up across the policy machinery but never as a stakeholder. AI is embedded in health and environment policy as data source, analytical tool, or siting object, and regulated in climate and energy as an industrial sector. In AI governance proper, AI is the direct subject of regulation, but that regulation targets welfare-relevant practices on human-safety grounds, subordinating welfare interests. This is notable, given a non-trivial possibility that AI is or will soon be a moral patient.