Resourced Authority A Mechanism-Design Model for Participatory Governance of Deployed AI Agents
Letting humans control AI by controlling its computing power
Researchers designed a system where groups of people can govern deployed AI agents by voting to allocate or withhold their computational resources. The mechanism works like a market where stakeholders cast votes using a special governance currency, which then converts into a compute budget that directly limits what the AI can do—making the humans' decisions automatically enforceable without extra policing.
As AI systems make important decisions in the real world, we need practical ways for humans to stay in control. This approach sidesteps the difficult problem of monitoring AI behavior by making the AI's physical resources contingent on human approval, similar to how a company's budget is contingent on board decisions. The biggest remaining challenge is preventing the AI itself from manipulating the human voters—which the authors identify as the mechanism's critical vulnerability.