AI Alignment & Governance Encyclopedia
The Home of Open, Accountable
Alignment & Governance for AI Models
There are many ways to make a model behave as its creators and users intend. This is the unified resource for understanding and applying them.
15 regimes·67 technical approaches·239 works indexed
What this is
The best-known way of giving an AI system binding norms is a written constitution: a document settled before deployment, applied to every case, and resolved into a single answer whenever its clauses pull against each other. That arrangement is one square of a much larger board, and it is not obviously the right one.
This encyclopedia maps the board. It crosses two questions — where a system’s binding norms live, and what the system does when those norms conflict — into 15 distinct governance regimes, each with a tradition in law, political theory or moral philosophy standing behind it. For every regime it records the approaches that place in it, the working methods behind each approach, and a concept-by-concept reading of how much of the borrowed tradition the built work actually carries. Borrowing Hart’s vocabulary and delivering a fifth of Hart is a finding, and the map is built to show it.
It currently indexes 239 works across 67 approaches. 93 of those works are methods — a mechanism given in enough detail to reimplement and shown working by its own authors — and only those count anywhere on the map. The empty space matters as much as the full: 3 of the 15 regimes have at most two working methods in them, and one has none at all. More about how it is built.
Ways in
Taxonomy
The whole field as fifteen parcels: where a system’s norms live, crossed with what it does when they conflict. Depth of colour is how much has actually been built there.
Open the grid →Historical Timeline
Every indexed work on a year axis, one lane per regime — so you can see which regimes the field has worked on for a decade and which arrived last year.
Open the timeline →Mind Map
The same material as a tree: five loci of authority branching into fifteen regimes, and each regime into the approaches that place in it.
Open the map →Config Finder
Say how you want a system governed — where its norms live, what happens when they conflict, who writes them — and find out whether anyone has built it.
Answer three questions →The two axes
The rows
Locus of authority
Before any particular case comes up, where does the binding content actually sit? Not who wrote it, and not whether it is any good — just where it is, and therefore what you would have to change to change the system’s norms.
- Codified
- A specification settled before deployment, complete in principle before any case arises.
- Case-accumulated
- A growing body of decided cases. Nothing is settled in advance; what to do is whatever the record has held.
- Customary
- Regularities of practice, never written down and never adjudicated.
- Dispositional
- Trained disposition rather than any external artifact. There is nothing to look up.
- Procedural
- No norms persist between decisions; a procedure — a vote, a deliberation, a debate — produces the answer each time.
The columns
Disposition of conflict
Two of the system’s norms point opposite ways, or two of the constituencies behind them do. What does the system do with that disagreement? This is the axis the field is least even on, and the one that decides whether anybody can argue back.
- Collapse
- The disagreement is aggregated, averaged or adjudicated away, and the output carries no trace of it.
- Contest
- Either the output carries the conflict, or the decision stays open to challenge through a standing channel.
- Partition
- Several normative orders are kept intact, and a rule assigns which one governs the case.
Crossing the two gives fifteen regimes — the grid is that crossing, and the configuration finder asks you these same two questions and tells you what has been built where your answers land.