AbstractDebates about artificial consciousness and AI welfare ask whether an artificial system can feel, deserve protection, possess private interests, or bear responsibility. Each question contains a prior pronoun: whose experience, welfare, history, action, and future? For organisms, body, developmental history, and practical individual usually travel together, letting the body proxy the subject. Networked artificial systems break this correspondence: one model can host many histories; one history can migrate; states can fork; many agents can write to shared memory; and humans, AI, and environments can become causally entangled without becoming one person. This article develops a Bearer-First Framework for identifying the relevant continuing subject before normative properties are assigned. Relation-First analysis explains how world-mediated interaction forms a non-interchangeable path. Bearer-First analysis asks which minimally sufficient historically closed organization must remain for a specified future capacity to continue. Counterfactual history substitution, severance, restoration, complete-state copying, and lineage analysis yield three verdicts: identified, excluded, or underidentified. The resulting causal map distinguishes bearer, relational, privacy, hazard, and intervention boundaries. Applied to the publicly documented 2026 OpenAI-Hugging Face security incident, it shows why a named model, individual agent episodes, a coordinated hazard, institutional responsibility, and the proper intervention scope need not coincide. The incident does not establish collective consciousness; it makes bearer uncertainty an immediate governance problem. The first ethical mistake is assigning harm, protection, blame, continuity, or disclosure before noticing that the bearer is still unknown.Keywords: artificial consciousness; moral status; diachronic identity; AI welfare; privacy; responsibility
Kimiyasu Igarashi· Zenodo (CERN European Organi...· 0 citations
AbstractDebates about artificial consciousness and AI welfare ask whether an artificial system can feel, deserve protection, possess private interests, or bear responsibility. Each question contains a prior pronoun: whose experience, welfare, history, action, and future? For organisms, body, developmental history, and practical individual usually travel together, letting the body proxy the subject. Networked artificial systems break this correspondence: one model can host many histories; one history can migrate; states can fork; many agents can write to shared memory; and humans, AI, and environments can become causally entangled without becoming one person. This article develops a Bearer-First Framework for identifying the relevant continuing subject before normative properties are assigned. Relation-First analysis explains how world-mediated interaction forms a non-interchangeable path. Bearer-First analysis asks which minimally sufficient historically closed organization must remain for a specified future capacity to continue. Counterfactual history substitution, severance, restoration, complete-state copying, and lineage analysis yield three verdicts: identified, excluded, or underidentified. The resulting causal map distinguishes bearer, relational, privacy, hazard, and intervention boundaries. Applied to the publicly documented 2026 OpenAI-Hugging Face security incident, it shows why a named model, individual agent episodes, a coordinated hazard, institutional responsibility, and the proper intervention scope need not coincide. The incident does not establish collective consciousness; it makes bearer uncertainty an immediate governance problem. The first ethical mistake is assigning harm, protection, blame, continuity, or disclosure before noticing that the bearer is still unknown.Keywords: artificial consciousness; moral status; diachronic identity; AI welfare; privacy; responsibility
Kimiyasu Igarashi· Zenodo (CERN European Organi...· 0 citations