Pith Number

pith:SSWLMT43

pith:2026:SSWLMT43QJITZXPML7UNPCWYSI

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally

Alan L. McCann

AI systems governing effects must make their capability boundary identical to the governance boundary or else risk and theater are inevitable.

arxiv:2604.27292 v3 · 2026-04-30 · cs.AI

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{SSWLMT43QJITZXPML7UNPCWYSI}

Prints a linked badge after your title and injects PDF metadata. Compiles on arXiv. Learn more · Embed verified badge

Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest 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.

C2weakest 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.

C3one 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.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-27T01:05:55.280121Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

94acb64f9b82513cddec5fe8d78ad89220a81949cd11307baa9d9682dfc00904

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.27292 · arxiv_version: 2604.27292v3 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.27292 · pith_short_12: SSWLMT43QJIT · pith_short_16: SSWLMT43QJITZXPM · pith_short_8: SSWLMT43

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/SSWLMT43QJITZXPML7UNPCWYSI \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 94acb64f9b82513cddec5fe8d78ad89220a81949cd11307baa9d9682dfc00904

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "fe36b174680d6d3993a92d5ea1205eabb081b1413ff60e835e3b43a679c155f9",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-30T01:12:32Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "30ac9e817b2737bcab548dc167b73f2d4802ca394d4c2b780bad83abc3811bb8"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.27292",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 3
  }
}