The machine's PILOT: cooperation and authority in AI-driven open science

Abstract

The machine's PILOT argues that cooperation between open science platforms, among them the Global Open Science Cloud, the African Open Science Platform, and the European Open Science Cloud, is secured not in the description of content, which inference increasingly supplies, but in the act by which one holder offers goods or services and another accepts them under agreed terms. A machine can hold the goods and perform the services, but it cannot perform the act, because offering and accepting are exercises of an authority a machine does not hold and for which it cannot answer. The paper places a governance contract at the act, bound to the interface, and divides its clauses by a single principle, PILOT, that is Purpose, Integrity, Lawful, Open, and Tested, requiring every term to be asserted by a named holder who can be held. The contract carries a small asserted core, identity, permission, provenance, and aboutness, that no machine can supply from within, and its legitimacy rests on the exterior legal, normative, and reputational standing of the holders who make and accept the offer. The paper concludes that open science is human before it is technical, and that the steersman a federation of clouds needs is supplied at the boundary, licensed and answerable, rather than built into the machine.This paper was prepared under the author's direction with the assistance of several AI systems, including various models of Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and DeepSeek. The models assisted with ideation, structuring, drafting, language editing, literature search, and critique. Drafting, analysis, and interpretation were carried out by the author. The ideas expressed here are, unless cited or referenced, those of the author. All normative claims are those of the author. Facts and citations were verified by the author, who takes full responsibility for the work. A structured statement is deposited with the record as a machine-readable object.