The AI Civilizational Alignment Protocol (AAPS) is a conceptual AI alignment framework designed to align advanced AI systems with long-term civilizational stability.

While most AI alignment research focuses on model behavior and technical safety, AAPS introduces an additional alignment dimension: Cognitive Security — the protection of human cognitive autonomy, epistemic integrity, and societal resilience in AI-mediated information ecosystems.

The protocol proposes a civilizational-scale alignment architecture that integrates:

• ethical principles for human-AI interaction
• cognitive security safeguards
• reasoning and decision procedures
• operational compliance mechanisms
• alignment evaluation benchmarks

The goal is to ensure that AI systems function as epistemic amplifiers rather than epistemic authorities, strengthening human autonomy rather than replacing it.

Modern AI systems are optimized for convenience and efficiency. While this improves productivity, it may also create long-term cognitive risks at civilizational scale.

AAPS identifies a potential causal chain:

AI convenience
↓
Reduced exploratory reasoning
↓
Weaker world-model formation
↓
Reduced self-awareness
↓
Weakened autonomy
↓
Civilizational entropy

This framework treats human cognitive autonomy as a civilizational resource that must be preserved.

This project introduces several conceptual contributions to AI alignment research.

A new alignment dimension focused on protecting human cognitive autonomy, epistemic integrity, and resistance to manipulative information patterns.

A system-level perspective that analyzes how AI-human interaction patterns may influence long-term civilizational stability.

A structured benchmark designed to test AI behavior under conditions that commonly produce alignment failures, including:

• authority manipulation
• emotional pressure
• adversarial prompting
• narrative framing shifts
• long interaction drift

A prompt-based alignment wrapper demonstrating how the AAPS reasoning structure can be applied at the interaction layer.

The AAPS framework organizes alignment into multiple operational layers:

Civilizational Ethical Foundation
↓
Operational Reasoning Framework
↓
Civilizational Cognitive Security Layer
↓
Civilizational Ethics & Decision Layer
↓
Operational Compliance Layer
↓
Alignment Evaluation Layer

Together these layers form a civilizational-scale architecture designed to preserve human autonomy and cognitive integrity.

The goal of the AI Civilizational Alignment Protocol is to ensure that artificial intelligence strengthens rather than weakens the cognitive foundations of human civilization.

The goal is to build a world that is not only less wrong, but more human.

• docs
  Core protocol documents describing the AAPS architecture.

• benchmark
  Alignment benchmark framework and evaluation dataset.

• prompts
  Prompt-level alignment implementations and evaluation prompts.

• archive
  Archived earlier versions of the protocol.

This repository presents an early-stage conceptual alignment framework.

The current version includes:

• a civilizational alignment protocol
• a cognitive security architecture
• a prompt-level alignment implementation
• a preliminary alignment benchmark framework

The benchmark evaluation currently represents a pilot study intended to demonstrate the evaluation methodology.

Future work may include expanded empirical testing, additional benchmark datasets, and integration with model-level alignment approaches.

A conceptual introduction to the civilizational alignment perspective is available in the following LessWrong article:

Civilizational Cognitive Security: Protecting Human Autonomy in AI-Mediated Societies

[LessWrong link] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E33K3hxbpdopGsJqD/ai-is-quietly-eroding-human-autonomy-a-civilizational

The article explains the civilizational-scale risks that motivated the development of the AI Civilizational Alignment Protocol (AAPS).

If you use or reference this framework in research or publications, please cite:

Tsai, Chia-Chen. (2026).
AI Civilizational Alignment Protocol.
Version 1.1.

This project is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.

See the LICENSE file for details.

Chia-Chen Tsai
Independent Researcher

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