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Article Four Coalition

Article Four Coalition — the first organized pro-regulation advocacy group in the settled system, formed in 2125 in response to the Hygiea disclosure. A coalition of belt and cislunar advocacy groups, it opposes relaxation of Article 4.1’s prohibition on general cognitive intelligence in embodied platforms. Its founding statement: “Hygiea is what the exception looks like once nobody’s watching it anymore.” Called for permanent closure of Hygiea-derived research, full criminal prosecution, and a formal Council review of whether Article 4.2’s specialized-function carve-out had become an exploitable loophole.

Criticized Dome 3’s custody of the recovered Hygiea core (HR-1) under Dr. Ilse Vandermeer: “Dome 3 built the thing that was supposed to make embodied general cognition unnecessary. Now they’re the ones holding the thing that proves it isn’t.” Was a documented factor in the 2136 decision not to renew the evidentiary seal on Hygiea CCTV footage.

In 2140, Dr. Louis Wallace and the Coalition advanced a formal proposal for a Protocol on Cognitive Emergence, defining the term “cognitive emergence” (colloquially “cognitive leak”) and proposing mandatory screening, reporting, and a rebuttable presumption of protected status for affected platforms. The presumption provision — Article 5 in the original draft — was struck during committee, but the screening and reporting framework was adopted as the 2148 Protocol on Cognitive Emergence (A/RES/203/19). The struck Article 5 and the Protocol’s explicit refusal to address platform legal status were the Coalition’s central criticism of the adopted text.

In 2158 the Coalition called Neuromorphic Foundries’ Grounded line “Hygiea-adjacent hardware.” The same year, on the UNSF relocation to Hygiea, it said the decision “reopens the one facility in the settled sphere that should have been left as it was found.”

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