How AI Is Rewiring Law and Authority

From EU regulation to blockchain contracts, the future of law is being compiled, not debated.

**
**
For most of human history, laws were stories with authors. A king issued decrees, a parliament debated bills, a judge wrote opinions. Every rule had an origin that could be traced back to someone.

That chain of authorship is breaking. Today, artificial intelligence, automation, and blockchain governance are generating rules that validate themselves without needing a human legislator or interpreter. Authority is shifting from will to form.

The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is one of the clearest examples. Draft sections of the Act were produced with AI-assisted tools, resulting in clauses that entered legislative pipelines not because of political consensus, but because the system compiled them into usable form.

The same happens with Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). In these systems, smart contracts execute automatically when conditions are met. No court, no legislator, no debate. The rule is law because the code runs.

Even global finance is moving this way. Basel III compliance frameworks are increasingly drafted and updated using automated systems that ensure regulations deploy directly into banks’ reporting pipelines.

*2. Why This Is Revolutionary
*
Traditionally, legitimacy in law meant asking: Who wrote this? Who interprets it?

Today, legitimacy is being redefined: Does it compile? Does it run? Does it enforce itself?

Speed and precision: Automated systems reduce ambiguity, generating clear outputs that can be deployed across institutions instantly.

Risk and opacity: If a rule compiles incorrectly, its flaws propagate automatically. No interpreter can intervene because interpretation has been designed out of the process.

This is not just a technical change. It is a shift in how societies understand authority itself.

*3. Case Studies Already Happening
*
The AI Act: Clauses partially written with AI are embedded in European lawmaking. Their authority derives from integration into the legal pipeline, not from political debate.

Blockchain DAOs: Smart contracts execute obligations instantly. There is no judge to reinterpret a bug. The DAO hack of 2016 proved that an error in compiled rules can have catastrophic consequences.

Basel III Finance: Regulatory rules for banks are updated through automated compliance systems. Enforcement depends on successful integration into software, not deliberation.

These cases show that the codex of authority is not theoretical. It is already embedded in our systems.

4. The New Sovereign

Political theorist Carl Schmitt once said, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In the 21st century, that definition is losing relevance.

The sovereign today is not the legislator or the judge. It is the compiler. Authority has migrated into the infrastructure. Rules become law when they validate and deploy successfully. This new figure is what I call the sovereign compiler: not a human, but a process.

5. The Risks We Face

1. Disappearance of interpretation: No court can reinterpret a smart contract or compiled financial rule once it executes.
3. Automatic error propagation: Bugs in DAOs or mis-specified clauses in AI Act drafts can spread instantly across systems.
5. Accountability without authors: Responsibility is transferred from legislators to pipelines and auditors. But who is accountable when the system itself generates the rule?

These risks are not science fiction. They are already material.

6. What Needs to Change

To live with executable law, institutions must redesign their safeguards:

• Executable audits: Independent checks must test compiled rules before deployment.
• Dual-layer validation: Rules need both semantic review and syntactic verification.
• Distributed accountability: Responsibility should be shared between authors, pipeline designers, and auditors.

Without these safeguards, we risk sliding into a world where legitimacy equals operability, and citizens are governed by rules no one fully understands.

7. The Bigger Picture

This transition is not only legal or technical. It is cultural. When authority shifts from authorship to compilation, society must redefine what it means for a rule to be legitimate.

The future of governance lies in executable law: norms that run on infrastructures and validate themselves. The challenge is making sure that these infrastructures remain accountable to the societies they govern.

Read the Full Article

📄 SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5432334

📄 Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/17026629

About the Author

**Agustin V. Startari **is a linguistic theorist and researcher in historical studies. Author of Executable Power, The Grammar of Objectivity, and Grammars of Power.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2545-6041

*SSRN Author Page: *https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=7639915

*Zenodo: *https://zenodo.org/me/uploads?q=&f=shared_with_me%3Afalse&l=list&p=1&s=10&sort=newest

Ethos
I do not use artificial intelligence to write what I don’t know. I use it to challenge what I do. I write to reclaim the voice in an age of automated neutrality. My work is not outsourced. It is authored. — Agustin V. Startari