{"paper":{"title":"The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"AI systems governing effects must make their capability boundary identical to the governance boundary or else risk and theater are inevitable.","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Alan L. McCann","submitted_at":"2026-04-30T01:12:32Z","abstract_excerpt":"Every system that performs effects has two boundaries: what it can do (expressiveness) and what governance covers (governance). In nearly all deployed AI systems, these boundaries are defined independently, creating three regions: governed capabilities (the only useful region), ungoverned capabilities (risk), and governance policies that address non-existent capabilities (theater). Two of the three regions are failure modes. We focus on the governance of effects: actions that AI systems perform in the world (API calls, database writes, tool invocations). This is distinct from the governance of"},"claims":{"count":4,"items":[{"kind":"strongest_claim","text":"Rice's theorem (1953) proves the gap is undecidable in the general case for any Turing-complete architecture that attempts to govern effects behaviorally: no algorithm can decide non-trivial semantic properties of arbitrary programs, including the property 'this program's effects comply with the governance policy.' We propose coterminous governance as the testable criterion for any AI governance system: either the two boundaries are provably identical, or risk and theater are structurally inevitable.","source":"verdict.strongest_claim","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C1","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"weakest_assumption","text":"That deployed AI systems attempting behavioral governance of effects can be accurately modeled as arbitrary Turing-complete programs whose semantic properties must be decided post-hoc, and that separating computation from effect is both feasible and sufficient to achieve coterminous boundaries in practice.","source":"verdict.weakest_assumption","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C2","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"one_line_summary","text":"Behavioral governance of AI effects is undecidable for Turing-complete architectures, making coterminous boundaries via computation-effect separation the only structural solution rather than post-hoc layers.","source":"verdict.one_line_summary","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C3","attestation":"unclaimed"},{"kind":"headline","text":"AI systems governing effects must make their capability boundary identical to the governance boundary or else risk and theater are inevitable.","source":"verdict.pith_extraction.headline","status":"machine_extracted","claim_id":"C4","attestation":"unclaimed"}],"snapshot_sha256":"38cb018f586a20cf3ba181581333e67c1523aa006bacdecb45a4d726c141fc07"},"source":{"id":"2604.27292","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":"a5ed5d72-5c58-40cd-9b74-b96ded340145","model_set":{"reader":"grok-4.3"},"created_at":"2026-05-07T09:36:34.786156Z","strongest_claim":"Rice's theorem (1953) proves the gap is undecidable in the general case for any Turing-complete architecture that attempts to govern effects behaviorally: no algorithm can decide non-trivial semantic properties of arbitrary programs, including the property 'this program's effects comply with the governance policy.' We propose coterminous governance as the testable criterion for any AI governance system: either the two boundaries are provably identical, or risk and theater are structurally inevitable.","one_line_summary":"Behavioral governance of AI effects is undecidable for Turing-complete architectures, making coterminous boundaries via computation-effect separation the only structural solution rather than post-hoc layers.","pipeline_version":"pith-pipeline@v0.9.0","weakest_assumption":"That deployed AI systems attempting behavioral governance of effects can be accurately modeled as arbitrary Turing-complete programs whose semantic properties must be decided post-hoc, and that separating computation from effect is both feasible and sufficient to achieve coterminous boundaries in practice.","pith_extraction_headline":"AI systems governing effects must make their capability boundary identical to the governance boundary or else risk and theater are inevitable."},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2604.27292/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[{"name":"ai_meta_artifact","ran_at":"2026-05-20T22:40:24.963037Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0},{"name":"doi_compliance","ran_at":"2026-05-19T19:24:36.517530Z","status":"completed","version":"1.0.0","findings_count":0}],"snapshot_sha256":"eba4f51ee62e804a00aa0fdf97f342d0a71f061709795296d19850e6508f7a92"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}