Essay · World Models New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Taonga in the Latent Space

Yann LeCun left Meta to bet a billion-dollar company that today’s language models cannot reason or plan because they lack a model of the world — and that the next architecture will not be built on them. He means the physical world. This essay argues the first world worth modelling is a community: the Village already holds the signed record of a community’s state and the gate that checks an action before it runs, and lacks only the picture in between — the one that lets an AI foresee what its action would do to the people. A community-state model, with the community as kaitiaki of the model of its own world, taonga and consent as first-class factors, federated rather than concentrated. Proposed as the next architectural step, not yet shipped.

Essay · AI Evolution New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Earning the Right to Propagate

How a human Village governs its own AI. In June 2026 Vincent Boucher (QUEBEC.AI & MONTREAL.AI) published a constitution for governing how institutional AI is allowed to evolve — GoalOS: The Proof-of-Evolution Constitution — and most of its primitives turned out to be ones we had already built, for human governance, and shipped. This essay reads that convergence as external validation, adopts the proof-gated promotion discipline we were missing for our own AI, refuses the blockchain the standard is built on (on sovereignty grounds its own neutrality clause permits), and adds the one gate the constitution lacks: keep the community the author. AI is the servant, not the subject.

Compliance · Governance New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Governance That Can’t Be Quietly Undone

New Zealand and Australia have both declined prescriptive AI legislation — what they have is principle (NZ’s non-binding Public Service AI Framework and voluntary Algorithm Charter; Australia’s proposed-then-shelved guardrails). This essay shows how the Village makes those soft-law principles — transparency, human oversight, auditability, data sovereignty — structurally enforced, and how a governance village and a kāhui Māori village actually run their deliberations, meetings, and votes on a tamper-evident substrate. Implemented and in-development features kept distinct.

Essay · Principle New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Sovereignty Without Dominance

Rightful authority at human scale, in the age of AI. An anchorpoint of principle that extends Alvin Wang Graylin rather than rebutting him — he is right that the AI “arms race” is a dead end — and asks Western readers to scrutinise the United States as evenly as they scrutinise China, with respect for every party and enmity toward none. Sovereignty here is not the capacity to dominate a technology but the rightful authority of a community over the systems that act on it: held at human scale, federated, never surrendered. Closes with a live exhibit from the days it was written.

Brief · Te Ao Māori New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Kaitiaki Intelligence and Mokopuna Recorder

Two prototype briefs and a reflection, from a consciously limited non-Māori standpoint. Western AI debate leads with “is it conscious?”; te ao Māori asks instead what relations an entity inhabits, whose authority it answers to, and whether it strengthens the mauri around it. Two small forms carry the argument — a place-based kaitiaki intelligence for one taonga, and a mokopuna recorder for whānau memory — where the AI assists and the people decide. Closes with the sharpest caution: borrow the relational vocabulary without devolving real authority and you reproduce the symbolic shell, not the substance.

Essay · Federation New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Federate, Don’t Align

The operational companion to The Map Has No Node for Legitimacy. If a small nation accepts it will never win the AI capacity race, what is the lowest-risk way to hold the authority it can? Read as a risk decision, three options appear — align with the American stack, align with the Chinese stack, or federate and align with neither. Only the federated mesh — of communities and of their inference — carries no irreversible tail. The argument extends to a national-scale federated Aotearoa, and names the posture: a non-aligned layer for AI.

Response · Critique New June 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

The Map Has No Node for Legitimacy

A response to Tim Clancy and Asmeret Bier Naugle’s qualitative model of AI sovereignty. Their five-lever framing measures sovereignty as capacity — and has no node for legitimacy, for the rightful authority of the people whose data trains and steers a system. The paper argues that governance sovereignty and substrate sovereignty are separable, that rightful authority is the layer the Village platform and Tractatus framework run at today, and that this is where the actors the model’s loops exclude can actually build.

Essay · Foundational New May 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Held in kōrero, not collapsed to a number — plural values, living organisations, and AI

A philosophical bridge between Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, Christopher Alexander’s living structure, and kāhui Māori hui-based deliberation — arguing that the dominant AI-governance frame is structurally wrong twice: once on values (it collapses what is irreducibly plural into a single score), once on life (it severs the participatory loop). Source material for the §5.5 “Skill evolution” slide in the Te Kāhui Māori June 2026 briefing.

Civil-Society Proposal · v1.2 New May 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

A Civil-Society Proposal for Sovereign and Federated Agentic AI in Aotearoa New Zealand

A civil-society contribution to NZ policymakers and community organisers, mirroring the structure of the People’s Republic of China’s 2026 Implementation Guidelines for intelligent agents. Six sections, 14 sub-sections, 38 numbered items, with a new §0 “Philosophical Foundations” chapter drawing on the Tractatus framework, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42 standards.

Paper A · Review Draft v4 New May 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL

Sovereign-Record Architecture for Community-Scale Platforms

An alternative substrate for community-scale platforms in which sovereignty is a property of the records themselves, not a concession the operator may revoke. Cryptographic provenance, tenant-bounded policy enforcement, bilateral and bounded federation, member-driven sovereign portability, and a supervised participatory dialogue surface.

Paper B · Synopsis New May 2026 · EN/DE/FR/MI/NL · 2-page synopsis

Situated Language Layers for Minority-Language and Indigenous Communities

Empirical companion to Paper A. Per-tenant situated language layer trained on the tenant’s own corpus, governed by the tenant’s own authority, on infrastructure inside the tenant’s jurisdictional reach. Five training-discipline rules empirically derived; nine weight-modification ablation experiments motivating a strict no-weight-modification stance.

STO-INN-0003 v2.1 January 2026 · Three Editions

Related surfaces

  • · What’s New — recent additions across papers and blogs.
  • · Reading Map of the Research — vocabulary index with cross-references into the papers.
  • · Research Guide — three audience routes (researcher / implementer / leader) with citations into the source material.
  • · Framework Documentation — implementation specs, internal documentation, source references.
  • · Blog — short-form analysis, case studies, and threat-model commentary.