We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Paine wrote this at the beginning of a great age of institutional invention: the era of constitutions, republics, and rights. We believe powerful AI² may be opening another such age, giving us the means to begin again and the need to do so.

By institutions, we mean the rules, roles, procedures, incentives, and organizations that structure how people coordinate. This includes familiar public institutions like courts and elections, but also venture capital, standards bodies, religious orders, and basic things like contracts.

All of this is up for reconsideration in the AI age, because institutions will change to accommodate new kinds of participants and because there are new possibilities for what the institutions themselves can do. AI agents differ from humans on axes like speed, scale, replicability, and intelligence;³ institutions will at minimum have to change to work well with them. But they will change far more than that. Institutions themselves will inevitably also integrate AI, which can change what they perceive, how they process information, and how they enforce rules.

It is often remarked that we stand at the dawn of a new industrial revolution.⁴ We should remember that the first was institutional as well as technological. Industrial production brought us the limited-liability corporation, the regulatory inspectorate, the labor union, and mass public schooling.⁵ These institutional changes were as consequential as the technological ones.

New governance structures will emerge whether we plan for them or not. Pax Machina brings that process onto the drafting table.

Despite growing recognition that powerful AI may transform society on a comparable scale, we are not yet engaged in a comparable practice of institutional design. Most of our collective attention remains focused on aligning, regulating, accelerating, or slowing the AI systems themselves, while treating the surrounding institutional infrastructure as fixed. Proposals for new institutions are scarce, scattered across fields, and rarely subject to sustained public debate.

Pax Machina exists to make this work concrete and cumulative. It is a publication for researchers to propose institutions suited to a world of humans and powerful AI. We are also excited to publish critiques and counterproposals that test and refine these ideas.

New governance structures will emerge whether we plan for them or not. Pax Machina brings that process onto the drafting table, turning the architecture of a world with powerful AI into a deliberate, collective project. Our ultimate aim is to foster an abundance of institutional forms that individuals and communities can adapt to fit the lives they want to lead.

AI changes the institutional landscape

Much in society depends on human limitations. One example is political stability: a president cannot personally direct every department, monitor every official, or execute every decision at once. Bureaucratic delegation and delay therefore constrain executive power. But imagine a president able to command thousands of perfectly loyal AI delegates, overseeing the entire machinery of state continuously and acting far faster than courts or legislatures could respond. The words of the Constitution wouldn’t change, but some of its practical checks and balances would stop working. We might then need faster oversight, or entirely new constraints on executive capacity. Researchers have catalogued dozens of such failure modes.⁶

AI also changes what institutions themselves can do. Government organizations, nonprofits, land trusts, and compute clouds are often associated with positive social missions. But nonprofit boards, government auditors, and citizens cannot oversee every action such an organization takes, monitor its impacts in detail, or compare its strategy to other ways its mission could be accomplished. Agents could allow for a more precise steering of government bodies, nonprofits, and private-but-mission-aligned asset pools, reporting transparently to human boards or even automatically suggesting bolder strategies.

Taking together the need to govern agents along with people, and the new possibilities in institution design, it seems many things will likely change: court systems with AI judges; market mechanisms that price human outcomes; media with AI context and factuality; property rights that track AI-understood purposes; international negotiations at AI speed; and more.

Some institutions could be far better than the status quo; others, far worse. On one hand, we could have unprecedentedly responsive representation; on the other, hyper-personalized political manipulation. The same ubiquitous monitoring could finally make public institutions accountable, or turn into an airtight surveillance state. The same AI agents could either help people clarify and pursue their considered goals, or gradually displace human judgment, leaving people unable to understand or steer the systems around them.

Institutional change has happened before

All the institutions we rely on, from corporate law and property rights to government agencies and courts, were devised in response to particular problems and conditions.

Some were created under stress, like the post-Soviet market institutions that handed Russia over to oligarchs.⁷

But many of our most enduring institutions were designed thoughtfully through debate and accumulated experience. A prominent example is the United States government. The founders publicly examined how their new republic might fail and built checks and balances in response. They also had a decade between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention to study what worked and what didn’t under the pre-federal state constitutions.⁸

For example, Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution (which Paine supported, as it happens) had one legislative chamber and no governor’s veto, so whichever faction won the annual election could pass whatever it liked. Massachusetts gave itself two chambers, a governor with a veto, and independent judges, forcing political decisions through several independent checks rather than a single assembly. When the Federal Constitution was drafted, it drew on the Massachusetts architecture of divided powers.⁹

The American Revolution kicked off a major shift in the institutional landscape beyond just the U.S. Similar institutions—not just constitutions and representative government, but independent judiciaries, patent systems, and more—appeared in France, then in much of Latin America, and later across the rest of Europe and much of Asia.¹⁰ Later technological shifts set off new cascades of institutional innovation. The Internet, for example, gave rise to online auctions, reputation systems, prediction markets, community governance, and multistakeholder institutions.¹¹

Some worry that institutions can create as many problems as they solve. During COVID, overlapping jurisdictions, agencies, and reporting systems often gridlocked coordinated action, for example.¹² Institutions can add bureaucracy and veto points, cement incumbents, distort incentives, or decay while remaining difficult to abolish. But these risks are an argument for beginning early, giving us time to test new arrangements before they are direly needed.

We are not approaching powerful AI with anything like this level of preparation. Concrete designs remain scarce, and we’re not experimenting with new mechanisms or building prototypes at anywhere near the scale we believe is necessary to succeed. Or at least, not yet.

What Pax Machina is for

Pax Machina is a forum for rigorous debate about how institutions should work in a world with powerful AI. It brings together researchers across mechanism design, political philosophy, social choice theory, law, economics, computer science, AI governance, and related fields, including people who see institutional implications in their work but have not had a natural home to develop them.

Responses are central to the publication. A proposal might be followed by a critique, an alternative design, or a revised version from the original author. Rather than a collection of isolated essays, we aim to produce a visible record of institutional ideas being proposed, contested, and refined.

We are looking for authors with a concrete institutional proposal, a sharp objection to one, or an analysis that changes how a class of institutions should be designed. A piece might propose a new mechanism, explain how AI alters an existing institution, identify a failure mode, draw a specific design lesson from history, or offer a roadmap tied to future capability thresholds. For example, regulatory markets are a concrete institutional proposal that invites equally concrete objections, and thus we’d consider it in scope.

The bar for publication is specificity. We’re looking for more than claims that AI will upend our social infrastructure. We want the design details: what should change, how would it work, who holds the authority, and what could go wrong?

To help orient this work, we’ve developed an interactive map of the institutional landscape, which we refer to as “the grid”. The grid organizes institutions by the scale at which they operate (rows) and the capacities they require of participants (columns). It is a provisional map of the landscape, and is not intended to be exhaustive. The historical view below shows how institutions accumulated across different eras.

A second view includes candidate institutions and research directions for a world of humans and autonomous AI agents. These entries are illustrative and opinionated, highlighting some of the possibilities we think deserve attention.

These possibilities raise several recurring design questions:

• How do we preserve human agency? How can institutions capture the benefits of AI without eroding people’s ability to understand, contest, and ultimately steer the systems they depend on?
• How can institutions adapt at AI speed without losing legitimacy? Institutions may need to respond faster as AI systems evolve. But speed can come at the expense of due process, accountability, contestability, and meaningful human consent.
• What properties should institutions demand of AI systems? Alignment, cooperation, trustworthiness, and controllability suggest different relationships between agents, people, and institutions; which matter in which settings, and are there new concepts that might be more fruitful?

If you’re working on these questions, or have an idea for an institutional design you’d like to develop, we want to hear from you. Write to us at editors@paxmachina.ai.

Beginning again

Institutions often change in bursts. An unexpected crisis, technological breakthrough, or political shift can suddenly make reforms possible that seemed unthinkable a year before. Political scientists call this a punctuated equilibrium.

The options on the table will be the ideas that have already been developed and tested. We need to do that work now.

We cannot know when the next such opening will come or who will hold power when it does. But we can be certain that when it arrives, there will be little time to design from scratch. The options on the table will be the ideas that have already been developed and tested. We need to do that work now, so that good proposals are ready when the opportunity arises.

As Tyler Cowen remarks, powerful AI will force us to rebuild our world. We are not used to thinking this way today. We inherited an institutional order and have mostly adjusted it at the margins in recent decades. The prospect of reimagining it can therefore feel impossible.

But humanity has rebuilt its world many times before. The liberal institutional order we inherited was itself the product of unusually bold design. It created radical forms of government and cooperation that now seem perfectly ordinary. Though deeply flawed and often sustained by violence, it stands among humanity’s great accomplishments.

Pax Machina exists to seed a rigorous debate about what a world of humans and powerful AI could and should look like. We hope it can accompany another great age of institutional invention. Let’s get to work.