Constitutional Epistemics: A Meta-Governance Substrate for Lawful and Auditable Machine Reasoning Systems

Constitutional Epistemics (CE) is a governance discipline for machine reasoning systems that constrains how epistemic authority (claims, classifications, recommendations, and decisions) is allowed to form, escalate, bind, and persist at runtime. As AI systems are increasingly deployed in administrative, economic, and civic contexts, accountability failures arise not only from harmful outcomes, but from illegitimate authority escalation: advisory outputs reused as defaults, risk scores promoted into gates, and opaque systems binding humans without explicit authorization. A system may be transparent and accurate while still exercising unlawful or unreviewable authority. CE addresses this gap by introducing a constitutional meta-governance substrate that governs the right to bind, rather than the merit of binding. Drawing on constitutional and administrative law analogies, CE requires explicit warrants for epistemic authority, declared scope and duration, lawful refusal and non-decision, and persistent contestation and audit artifacts. Authority that lacks warrant or exceeds its declared jurisdiction must fail closed, producing trace rather than silence. CE does not prescribe values, outcomes, or alignment objectives, nor does it replace existing legal, ethical, or risk frameworks. Instead, it enables their lawful, auditable implementation within machine systems by making authority transitions explicit and reviewable. In this role, CE functions as an implementation-level governance layer compatible with regulatory regimes such as the EU AI Act, as well as organizational oversight, risk management, and conformity assessment processes.