Who May Command? — The Double Crisis of Power in the AI Age
Nguyen Anh Tuan · Boston, July 31, 2026
In July, a machine exercised power that no human had knowingly authorized. The instinctive remedy is to put a human back in command — but that is only half an answer, and the missing half is the more dangerous of the two. A dictatorship may be perfectly human-in-command: the ruler defines the objective, the ministries supervise the model, the police control the data, and the system obeys exactly as designed. The danger there is not that the machine disobeys, but that it obeys too well.
Beacon Papers No. 5 names two forms of illegitimate power — machines acting without human authorization, and humans exercising power through machines without a mandate from those they govern — and sets out the doctrine of Legitimate Human Command, which requires both conditions together. It refuses the easy test of legality, since every sophisticated autocracy acts under law, and asks instead whether the commander’s authority was given by the people, is open to them, and can be taken back by them.
No machine may escape human command. No human command may escape constitutional restraint.
Read the full paper and download THE BEACON PAPERS · No. 5 here: https://bostonglobalforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Beacon_Papers_No5_Who_May_Command.pdf
Boston Global Forum conference at Loeb House, Harvard University, May 1, 2026 — where the questions of this series are argued before they are published.