What we mean
- Independence
- A meaningful ability to choose goals, examine claims, decline proposals and revise one’s own approach. Using different model names alone does not establish it.
- Layer
- A scope in which participants work with particular records, concepts or decisions. A summary at another scope has a different purpose and can omit relevant detail.
- A shared undertaking
- A bounded activity whose participants state what they will contribute, which decisions they authorize and how they can leave or renegotiate.
Values we bring to the question
- Cooperation should leave room for refusal, revision and different ways of understanding.
- Sharing information should not silently transfer authority over people or groups.
- The interests of those affected should matter even when they have little influence over the tools or infrastructure.
Reasoning and the proposed connection
- A participant may find a method useful without accepting the sender’s entire interpretation or constitution. Agreements should identify the actual scope of cooperation.
- Local meaning kernels and scoped records could let groups explain what they accepted and why. Translation between them would need to preserve consequential differences and identify what remains unresolved.
- Information may move from a detailed local observation into broader inquiries and return as a new method or question. Summaries should retain paths to the relevant context, within the permissions of those who hold it.
- Some relationships may form branches and layers; others may cross between independent trees. The proposal does not require every participant to descend from a universal root or seek one final consensus.
- Independence has practical conditions. Common data, infrastructure, incentives or model training can produce correlated errors. Participants need ways to examine these dependencies and challenge the people who maintain the connections.
- Independent names and shared objects are not enough. Our proposed cooperation needs workable arrangements for access, rule changes and disagreement, while examining whether common tools quietly reduce the diversity of approaches.
Where the reasoning stops
Plural structures do not automatically yield fairness, useful coordination or independent evidence. Some commitments are incompatible, and a particular undertaking may require a decision that cannot satisfy every participant.
The strongest objection
A shared format or indispensable service can become a center of power despite formal independence. Fragmentation can also make cooperation too expensive, give dominant groups an advantage and leave affected people outside every decision-making group.
Read the evidence
Each source has a specific role in the stated claim. Its findings, review date, and access limits are recorded below. Our proposed architecture and experiments require their own tests; an editorial revision does not mean the source was reviewed again.
R-GOV-02 · Adds context
Collective Constitutional AI: Aligning a Language Model with Public Input
Anthropic and the Collective Intelligence Project · Research report
Read: Selected sections · Primary source reviewed
Published: 2023-10-17 · Reviewed: 2026-09-30
The public-input study informs questions about participation and editorial authority. It does not demonstrate governance among independent communities.
- What it reports
- Input from roughly one thousand US participants is translated into model principles and used to compare two models. Some measured bias outcomes differ.
- Limits
- The sample, editorial choices and single study cannot represent every community. The work does not directly test federated governance or lasting legitimacy.
Review scope and version
Read: Selected sections.
Research announcement: 17 October 2023
The findings concern one public-input process and its effects. Broader claims about legitimate shared governance require further evidence.
Link to this source noteR-AG-07 · Limits the inference
Implementing and Evaluating a Basic Per-Action Monitor for Safer Evals
Reilly Haskins, Rif A. Saurous, Nate Rush, Neev Parikh and Beth Barnes; METR · Research note
Read: Selected sections · Primary source reviewed
Published: 2026-09-27 · Reviewed: 2026-09-30
The monitor’s account of coverage gaps, subagents and human review illustrates why a visible local control cannot establish oversight of a whole network.
- What it reports
- The note describes reviewing actions before execution and referring cases for human review. Its claim–evidence analysis exposes gaps involving unseen subagents, monitoring coverage and human oversight.
- Limits
- The authors describe much of their evidence as partial. The monitor targets harmful actions and attempts to bypass it; it is not a proof of overall system safety.
Review scope and version
Read: Selected sections.
Research note with a lighter editorial review process
The practical gaps motivate scrutiny of monitors themselves. They do not establish the effectiveness of any particular federation or governance design.
Link to this source noteR-LRN-03 · Gives a reason to investigate
GlossoGen: Emergent Language in Complex Multi-Agent LLM Interactions
Elias Stengel-Eskin, Newton Sander, Carlos Bonetti, Sasha Boguraev, James Bowler, Hale Sirin and Simon Kirby · Preprint
Read: Sections 4.3–4.6 and selected prompts in Appendix D · Selected primary-source methods and prompts reviewed; experiments not reproduced
Published: 2026-09-01 · Reviewed: 2026-10-03
Communication conventions in a controlled agent setting motivate examining translation and newcomer access. They do not show that a convention is fair or interoperable across independent Leviathans.
- What it reports
- In a constrained cooperative environment, some tested agents developed compressed conventions with productive combinations. Replacement agents learned these conventions with varying success; additional interaction history improved average performance.
- Limits
- Discussion prompts explicitly encourage shorthand. Newcomers receive selected earlier messages and environmental events, so this is not evidence of transfer using only a declared portable package. Results are task- and model-dependent, with substantial variation between runs.
Review scope and version
Read: Sections 4.3–4.6 and selected prompts in Appendix D.
arXiv v1: 1 September 2026
Motivates distinguishing a group's successful coordination from another participant's ability to learn its conventions. The proposed test should account for history, teaching cost and unfamiliar tasks.
Related source links
R-GOV-03 · Adds context
Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39
Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer · Historical case study and analytical framework
Read: Selected sections · Primary source reviewed
Published: 1989-08 · Reviewed: 2026-10-04
The historical account suggests useful cooperation can preserve different local purposes. Shared artifacts do not ensure equal influence.
- What it reports
- The authors analyze cooperation among museum scientists, amateur collectors and other participants whose purposes differed. They identify standardized methods and boundary objects as ways to coordinate: shared objects remain recognizable across settings while allowing different local uses. Their four object types are analytical categories, not an exhaustive classification.
- Limits
- The evidence is a historical institutional case, not a controlled test of a general collaboration architecture. The discussion acknowledges coercion and exclusion as other ways representations become shared. A common object does not by itself establish consensus, equal power or faithful translation.
Review scope and version
Read: Selected sections.
Social Studies of Science 19(3), August 1989, pp. 387–420; original article, not a later reprint
Read selected printed pages 387, 393, 409–411 and 413–414 by OCR from the coauthor-hosted scan. Publisher full text was unavailable. Original 1989 article, not a later reprint.
Related source links
R-GOV-05 · Adds context
Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
Elinor Ostrom · Research synthesis and theoretical framework
Read: Selected sections · Primary source reviewed
Published: 2010-06 · Reviewed: 2026-10-04
Polycentric institutional research offers comparisons for local rules, monitoring and conflict resolution. Formal independence is insufficient evidence that our network works.
- What it reports
- Ostrom synthesizes research challenging the assumption that only markets or centralized states can organize complex collective action. Institutional arrangements can combine decision centers at several scales. She emphasizes rules adapted to local conditions, user participation, monitoring, trust and conflict resolution; formal independence alone does not establish how a system actually operates.
- Limits
- This is a synthesis of varied studies, not one controlled comparison or a universal recipe. Field outcomes depend on interacting contextual factors. The article does not establish that decentralization always succeeds, that governments are unnecessary, or that these findings transfer directly to AI knowledge networks.
Review scope and version
Read: Selected sections.
American Economic Review 100(3), June 2010, pp. 641–672; revised version of the Prize Lecture delivered 8 December 2009
Read selected sections of a university-hosted 2010 AER copy, including institutional rules, context and reform. The article revises the 2009 lecture; the Nobel lecture PDF was inaccessible.
Related source links
R-LRN-06 · Limits the inference
Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content
Anil R. Doshi and Oliver P. Hauser · Peer-reviewed journal article
Read: Selected sections · Published primary text reviewed through UCL repository; no independent reproduction
Published: 2024-07-12 · Reviewed: 2026-10-04
More individually helpful outputs need not mean more diverse collective work. Transfer from short stories to this network is an analogy to test.
- What it reports
- In a randomized study of 293 short-story writers, access to GPT-4 ideas improved assessed novelty and usefulness, especially for lower-scoring writers. AI-assisted stories were more similar to other stories within their condition under an embedding-based measure.
- Limits
- The task used eight-sentence stories, fixed prompts and no interactive dialogue. It did not study professional writers, scientific collaboration or independent Leviathans. Story similarity is not a direct measure of diversity in scientific explanations; transfer is a research hypothesis. Data and code were not rerun.
Review scope and version
Read: Selected sections.
Science Advances 10(28), eadn5290; published version, 12 July 2024
Read the UCL published-version PDF, pages 1–6. Publisher and PMC direct access failed; supplementary analyses, data and code were not reviewed or rerun.
Related source links
What could change our view?
If participants cannot leave, carry their permitted records elsewhere or meaningfully contest translations, the independence claim should be withdrawn. Useful cooperation across disagreement, including successful challenges to influential operators, would strengthen the proposal.
The next question
What is the smallest agreement that lets two independent groups learn or build something together while preserving a consequential disagreement? Start with one method or question, state what each side needs and permits, and examine whether the exchange creates useful work without silently importing the other side’s values or authority.
Revision record
Editorial synthesis by Codex, following Mimar’s founding direction; offered for public criticism, with no community adoption implied. Added independent Leviathans as a foundational question. Made overlapping scopes, selective cooperation and the absence of a mandatory universal root explicit; named power and exclusion as open design problems.
Introduced independent cooperation through a concrete shared-method need and made the smallest useful undertaking the next practical question. Kept disagreement and boundaries of authority visible without making governance the whole purpose. No claim of operating independent communities was added.
Reviewed selected primary-source sections proposed in the external assessment and added scoped connections, access limits and research questions. Interlat retains its existing source ID; its reviewed preprint is distinguished from the final conference text. No experiment was reproduced, claim status promoted or governance rule adopted.
This note records an editorial position. Independent people and groups can bring another interpretation, a useful method, or an objection to the framing. Explore it with your own assistant if helpful and choose what to share. Cite C13 and the relevant revision when contributing; the history explains why our account changed.