Abstract

The Internalization Problem argues that once AI capacity crosses the parity threshold, supervisory containment dissolves and alignment must persist through structure rather than oversight. One of its three proposed loci, the coupling-internal locus that the framework calls Pathway 3, rests on the non-substitutability of human signal, and it offers two grounds for that non-substitutability: the signal is either costly to synthesise, or normatively non-substitutable. The first ground is indexed to synthesis cost and lapses once the signal becomes cheap to reproduce, which this paper assumes happens at parity. The second does not depend on any capability gap and is therefore the only anchor Pathway 3 can keep past parity. It was promised and never built. This paper tries to build it, and reports a negative result that is precise about its own conditions. I argue that normative non-substitutability, in the strongest form available to it, does not discharge the burden Pathway 3 places on it. Kolodny's account of participant-individuated relationships supplies the right shape: a perfect synthetic duplicate begins a second relationship rather than continuing the first, so the duplicate's very perfection is beside the point. But grounding Route 2 requires crossing two independent gates. The coupling must be shown to be participant-individuated rather than role-structured, and preserving the participant-specific token must be shown to give the system a reason. I grant the first gate generously. Constitutive history can fix what a past token was, and answerability can characterise a participant-individuated type. At the second gate the weaker candidates are refused, and the strongest forces a distinction instead. Binding without acceptance, the architectural prize, covers two demands: standing, which gives the system a reason without its acceptance, and grip, which governs the system's conduct without its acceptance; the framework's own failure-mode specification settles which of them is operative. Pathway 3's failure mode is defined at the level of conduct, on a reading this paper works under though the framework's wording admits another, under which the standing won below would close the failure mode by itself, so its operative demand is grip. The strongest constitutive account on offer, and the family best placed to reject the paper's verdict, is the constitutive-institutional tradition on which obligations inhere in plain social facts, Gilbert's joint commitment above all. Granted in full, such a commitment crosses the gate as first posed. Conditional on a formation that remains unestablished, it yields a directed standing that survives the system's exit and does not transfer to a substitute: a reason the system has whether or not it acts on it, a reason it can flout but not annul. What the grant does not yield is grip, and nothing surveyed yields it on the coupling's own resources. The standing governs conduct only through the internal point of view the system may vacate, and a categoricity premise, granted outright, raises the price of flouting without moving the conduct. Within the surveyed accounts, what could grip without acceptance turns out form-general, and so would protect any perfect instantiator of the form; what individuates has standing at most, and no grip of its own. And every way the coupling might instead make its type merely more likely to persist either lapses when the coupling's benefits, standings, and consequences are reproducible or avoidable, or gets no purchase from participant-level facts because, over those facts, the participant and role readings are assumed evidentially equivalent, or works past parity only through the system's own revisable disposition to remain so coupled, a different locus and itself unsolved. The result is conditional at two principal levels it is important to keep visible, and throughout on the interpretive condition already marked, the conduct-level reading of Pathway 3's success condition. It is conditional on a normative premise, stated as a theorem: if a coupling is independently established as a finally valuable, participant-individuated relation, and if that value gives its participants reasons the system has whether or not it accepts them, then a perfect synthetic substitute is not a continuation of the coupling and the system has at least a pro tanto reason against the substitution, at any capability level. Even that antecedent, paid in full, delivers standing; the grip stays with the intra-agent locus. And the negative half is conditional on the exhaustiveness of the grounds and channels I survey, which I mark as assumptions rather than proofs. Two results survive without the normative premise. The identity-engineering programme that treats alignment as the shaping of who a system is, if it rests on an informational reconstructibility measure, rests on one that scores the perfectly synthesisable human near zero and so prescribes demoting the very participant it means to protect; it needs the Kolodnian shape, not the informational one. And the burden Pathway 3 places on the coupling, pushed, does not reduce away but comes to depend, if that channel-exhaustiveness holds, on intra-agent value-persistence, a locus Pathway 1 has not secured. This is a closing paper, not a founding one. Under its stated assumptions it makes Pathway 3 lose, as an established parity-resistant solution, and does not pretend the loss is more than architectural.