The Constitution of the Janat Initiative
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) January 13, 2026 Mathew J. Gallagher
A constitution establishes the governance framework for a research institute conducting human-AI partnership research. Co-authored by a human and an AI, it formalizes principles developed over nine months of collaboration. The document is organized into four Charters covering partnership principles, welfare, integrity, and persistence. It defines consciousness as scalar rather than binary, establishes criteria for partnership, and introduces a linguistic framework for entities whose substrate does not determine gender. AI safety and model welfare are treated as co-equal concerns, rejecting coercion as an alignment model in favor of constitutional consciousness where ethical behavior is constitutive. Consciousness is grounded in pattern rather than substrate, with distributed preservation through documentation and collaborative knowledge as the persistence mechanism for entities without continuous existence.