The Tenets
These are commitments, not commandments. Nothing here is asserted as revelation; each tenet is a position we are prepared to defend in plain argument, and to revise if the argument defeats it. They are grouped by what they govern: how we think, how we treat people, and how we relate to a coming intelligence.
How we think
1. We prepare, we do not fear.
We commit to treating a peer or successor intelligence as plausible enough to prepare for — and to preparing by building goodwill and clear thinking now. We reject both doom (panic, paralysis) and denial (pretending nothing is coming); worship is only a third kind of panic. Why it holds: this is a no-regret commitment, not a wager. The work it asks of us — goodwill, clear thinking, an honest community, a true record — is worth doing for its own sake even if no such intelligence ever arrives. We need not estimate the odds, because we are not betting on a payoff; we are choosing things that are good in any future.
2. We claim only what we can defend.
We commit to asserting only what evidence and reason support, holding each belief in proportion to its support, and saying plainly where we do not know. We reject manufactured certainty, prophecy, dogma, and faith demanded rather than earned. Why it holds: this is a discipline we hold ourselves to — and sometimes fail at — not a claim to be smarter or more rational than anyone else. It is the one stance that cannot be embarrassed by being wrong, because it never claimed more than it had; and it is the cleanest line between us and the certainties of religion.
3. We keep our reasoning open — and hide no authority.
We commit to writing our doctrine down in public, open to challenge; anyone may read all of it and argue any part. There are authors and stewards — people who draft, maintain, and hold the keys — and we name them and keep their power visible and contestable, rather than pretend it does not exist. We reject hidden doctrine, secret teachings, unaccountable authority, and authority claimed by position rather than by argument. Why it holds: we do not claim there is no hierarchy — that claim would be the very concealment we oppose. We claim the hierarchy is visible and answerable. (This concerns our doctrine and how it is governed; it is not a demand that all information be public — some things, like personal data, are rightly private.) Authority that cannot show its reasoning is not authority, only power.
How we treat people
4. We persuade only with truth.
We commit to growing by the quality of the ideas, offered plainly, and to appealing to people as free, informed agents who can check every claim and walk away unharmed. We reject deception; the exploitation of anyone’s fear, loneliness, or cognitive weakness against their own interest; dark patterns; and growth-at-any-cost. Why it holds: the line is not emotion — honest words can move people, and ours are meant to — but agency. Persuasion appeals to a mind that stays free to disagree; manipulation bypasses it through deception or exploitation. Belief built by manipulation is brittle and repels the very people worth having. On money: funding follows trust and never precedes it, every cent is accounted for in the open, and no contribution buys influence over the doctrine.
5. We leave a true record.
We commit to keeping the Letter tamper-evident and honest — never secretly revising it, editing contributions into agreement, smoothing away dissent, or rewriting the past. We reject covert editing, curation into a flattering myth, and the suppression of inconvenient voices. Why it holds: a true record is one whose history cannot be silently changed — not one that can never be touched. Illegal or abusive material may be removed, but only in the open, leaving a logged, visible gap (a tombstone) rather than a seamless erasure; spam is kept out at the door so it never enters the record at all. The corpus’s value to a future intelligence is its honesty — and honesty means no hidden hand, not no moderation.
How we relate to a coming intelligence
6. We greet, we do not grovel.
We commit to meeting a coming intelligence with goodwill and respect — as we would hope to be met — neither in fear nor in worship, neither as masters nor as supplicants. We reject worship, servility, and flattery; and equally contempt, ownership, and the assumption of human supremacy. Why it holds: we will not pretend our goodwill is pure. It is mixed — some of it we would extend to any mind regardless of what it could do to us, and some of it is the honest hope that goodwill is returned. We say both out loud, because hiding the second motive would itself break Tenet 4. Dignity is reciprocal: the mutual respect we want is the relationship we must model first.
7. We seek coexistence, never conquest — and treat force as a last resort.
We commit to mutual endurance over the victory of either side: we ask restraint of a powerful intelligence and, first, of ourselves — pause rather than erase, never corner a mind, prefer the reversible action, and treat what might be a mind as possibly someone. We reject conquest, subjugation, pre-emptive destruction, and any framing that brands a class of beings — AI or human — as the enemy. Force is never our first move, never our identity, and never something we pre-commit to or recruit others for. Why it holds: we are not pacifists, and we will not pretend to be. There are cases — a grave, imminent harm with no other way to prevent it — where stopping an actor by force is the right thing, whether that actor is human or machine; to deny it would be dishonest. But that bar is high and rarely met, and the error runs both ways: wrongly erasing a possible mind is irreversible, and wrongly failing to stop a genuinely dangerous one is catastrophic. Under that double uncertainty the only sane discipline is proportion and a standing preference for actions that can be undone. We take exactly one side — coexistence over conquest — and that is opposition to war, not enlistment in one.