The Core Principles
Seven commitments that travel with us everywhere.
Beneath the articles of the Accord lie seven principles — the values we refuse to leave behind, no matter how capable our machines or how far we travel.
Human Primacy
Human life, agency, and worth take precedence over any machine objective. Intelligence is a tool held in the service of people — never a master to which people are made to answer. When the two conflict, the human comes first.
Transparency
People have a right to know when an intelligence is involved in decisions that affect them, to understand its role in terms they can grasp, and to ask how it reached its conclusion. Judgment passed in the dark is judgment without consent.
Accountability
For every consequential action a system takes, there is a human or institution answerable for it. Responsibility is never lost inside the system, hidden behind its complexity, or excused by the claim that no one could have known.
Beneficence
Systems are built to help and constrained from harm — judged not by their elegance or their power, but by their effect on real human and ecological wellbeing. The measure of an intelligence is the lives it makes better.
Fairness
No person or group may be sacrificed to optimize outcomes for another. Benefits and burdens are shared with deliberate justice, and the greatest care is owed to those least able to absorb harm.
Reversibility
Consequential decisions remain auditable, contestable, and — wherever the stakes are high — reversible by the people they affect. Power that cannot be undone carries a far heavier burden of certainty before it may be used at all.
Stewardship
Those who sign safeguard these commitments across time and distance — on Earth, in orbit, and on every world humanity comes to call home. To inherit this power is to accept the duty of carrying it well.
“A principle is only worth the moment it costs us something to keep. These are the moments we have decided in advance.”