From Protocols to Evidence: Bounded Claims for AI in Service of the Common Good

Abstract

Claims that Artificial Intelligence systems improve decisions, broaden access, reduce harm, or empower users can exceed what their evaluation establishes. Predictive performance alone does not establish safety, the presence of oversight does not establish meaningful control, and faster task completion does not establish understanding or choice. Evaluation must account for unreliable outputs and uneven performance, but also for overreliance, weakened recourse, and displaced human expertise. The harder questions are what the evidence warrants, which relations of power remain unexamined, and where measurement must stop. Assessing improvement requires examining what institutions value and the conditions AI is asked to address. AI is both revelation and intervention. Its use can reveal unmet human needs and assumptions about what matters. Once deployed, it can repair, compound, substitute for, or conceal existing failures. We develop a rupture test that evaluates deployment against explicit human and non-AI baselines. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, we examine dignity and the common good alongside questions of who owns AI infrastructure and who controls its use. These commitments shape judgments about improvement; evidence alone cannot establish moral or political legitimacy. We distinguish evidence-bounded deployment, which limits claims to what has been evaluated, from measurement-bounded governance, which records constraints that favorable evidence cannot override. RISE AI provides an evidence architecture for making bounded claims about Responsibility, Inclusivity, Safety, and Empowerment. It records what is claimed, who answers for it, what evidence supports it, and what would require the claim to be qualified, revised, or withdrawn.