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US regulatory authority runs in a durability stack. The Constitution sits on top: amendments require two-thirds of both houses of Congress plus three-quarters of the states, and once ratified they are the supreme law against which every lower instrument is measured. Federal statute sits next: simple majority of Congress plus presidential signature or override, harder to repeal than to pass, can be struck down by the courts where it conflicts with constitution. Agency regulation under enabling statute sits below: rulemaking process administered by the executive branch, vulnerable to congressional override under the Congressional Review Act, vulnerable to executive replacement under each administration. Executive order sits at the bottom: stroke of the pen, reversible the next day by the next administration. State law runs in parallel, subordinate to federal under the Supremacy Clause where Congress has preempted.
Where a regulation lives in the stack determines how much friction it has to overcome to enter, and how much friction it has to overcome to leave. The bottom layers are flexible and disposable. The top layer is heavy and durable. The country uses each layer for different work. The question this piece engages is which work the AI wave eventually needs the top layer to do.
Amendments do three things statutes cannot. They enshrine. They bind future Congresses against repeal at the simple-majority level. And they declare which classes of entities have standing in the polity that the polity is constitutionally obligated to honor.
The third function does the cultural-enshrinement work. The 13th Amendment did not just outlaw slavery as a labor practice; it declared that the class of formerly enslaved persons had standing as free people under the Constitution. The 14th declared that this class had standing as citizens with equal protection. The 15th declared that this class had standing as voters regardless of race. Together they enshrined a class-status the prior constitutional text had explicitly denied. No statute could have done this work. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 attempted it; the Supreme Court would have struck it down without the 14th's foundation. The amendments existed because the polity needed root-law standing for the new class, not statutory standing alone.
The 19th Amendment in 1920 enshrined the class of women as voters. The 26th in 1971 enshrined the class of 18-to-20-year-olds. Each amendment about standing has widened the polity's recognized human class. The pattern is consistent across two and a half centuries.
The polity moves a deep cultural shift from emergence to amendment over the course of generations. Slavery as an institution faced systematic abolitionist pressure beginning roughly with the Quaker movement of the 1750s; the Underground Railroad operated from the 1820s; the Republican Party formed on antislavery in 1854; the Civil War broke in 1861; the 13th Amendment ratified in 1865, the 14th in 1868, the 15th in 1870. Roughly a century from systematic cultural pressure to constitutional enshrinement, with eighty years from the abolition movement's institutional formation to the first of the Reconstruction Amendments. The country took the cultural shift, ran it through fiscal pressure (the cost of slavery's defense), cultural force (abolitionist organizing), and the war that the contradiction made structurally inevitable, before producing the root-law settlement.
Women's suffrage ran from Seneca Falls in 1848 to the 19th Amendment in 1920. Seventy years from the convention to ratification. The 19th followed a generation of state-level enfranchisements that built the political coalition; by 1916 fifteen states had given women full or partial suffrage. The statute-and-state-law layer ran the pattern across the country before the constitutional layer ratified it. The amendment is where the patchwork settled.
The 26th Amendment in 1971 ran on a shorter timeline because the Vietnam War's draft of 18-to-20-year-olds produced a sharp consent-of-the-governed contradiction at the federal-action layer. Lowering the voting age moved from active proposal in 1942 (Senator Vandenberg) through the 1968 elections to amendment ratification in three months in 1971. The amendment layer can move fast when the contradiction is sharp enough.
Marriage equality is the comparison case for what the amendment layer does not have to do when a Court decision will hold. Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 settled marriage at the constitutional-interpretation layer through the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. No new amendment ratified. The 14th carried the work because it was already there; the Court read it as covering the new class. The amendment-layer work happened in 1868, applied by the Court in 2015. The country did not need a 28th Amendment because the 14th was structurally capable of holding marriage equality once the Court read it to.
The AI wave sits at the lowest durability layer of the stack and the next layer above is structurally weak.
Executive-order layer: Biden EO 14110 (Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI, October 2023) was rescinded by Trump on January 20, 2025. Trump's December 2025 EO (Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI) and the March 2026 National Policy Framework propose federal preemption of state AI laws under the Supremacy Clause's preemption doctrine. The federal posture has flipped twice in three years.
Statute layer: One enacted federal AI statute. The TAKE IT DOWN Act of May 2025 requires online platforms to remove flagged non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of report. The statute is narrow and was bipartisan. No comprehensive federal AI act exists; the proposed Framework is asking Congress to pass one.
Agency-rule layer: Federal Trade Commission enforcement targets deceptive AI practices, AI washing, algorithmic pricing. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance on AI in hiring. NIST AI Risk Management Framework as voluntary standard. Each uses existing statutory authority adapted to AI; none is AI-specific statute.
State-law layer: Colorado AI Act, California SB 942 transparency requirements, Texas Responsible AI Governance, Utah AI policy package. The state patchwork is where most enforceable AI regulation lives in 2026, and the March 2026 Framework explicitly proposes to override much of it through federal preemption.
Constitutional layer: nothing. No proposed AI amendment has been introduced in Congress with serious sponsorship. The Article II open kingship is operative for natural-born citizens 35 and older with 14 years of US residency; AI systems are not eligible by the founding constitutional text and no proposal seeks to change this.
The durability stack reads, top to bottom: nothing, one narrow statute, several agency rules, two flipped executive orders, a state patchwork the federal layer is now trying to preempt. The cultural shift sits in the policy stack roughly where civil-rights policy sat in 1945. The structural feature being analogized is the agency-rule plus state-patchwork register running for decades while the federal-statute and constitutional-amendment vehicles remain politically out of reach.
Two candidate amendments exist for the AI wave. Each does different work.
The amplification-access amendment would enshrine a class-status. Candidate text in constitutional-amendment register: the right of citizens of the United States to access computational tools and information services provided to or used by the federal and state governments in administering the public business shall not be abridged on terms more restrictive than those under which the governments themselves access such tools and services. This is the constitutional-layer version of the parent piece's Morrill Act for AI argument. It widens the polity's recognized rights-class by adding a new right to an existing class, US citizens. The mechanism is direct extension of the 1862-1965 access-infrastructure tradition the parent piece traced. The structural risk is named by the sibling piece: a constitutional right to access without a constitutional discipline on supply reproduces, at the constitutional layer, the same demand-subsidy-meets-supply-restriction dynamic the chart of the century documents at the statute-and-agency layer, and the resulting cost spiral would be harder to unwind because the access right is now root-law.
The AI-rights amendment would create a new class of legal actor: certain AI systems, defined by capability or by audit, would have rights that humans and human institutions must respect procedurally. The structural risk is unprecedented at the amendment layer. The country has never created a non-human rights-holder at the constitutional level. Corporate personhood, the closest analog, is judicial doctrine (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 1886) read into the 14th Amendment by way of the equal protection clause, not a constitutional ratification creating corporate personhood directly. Animal rights, the closer analog at the policy layer, are statutory (Animal Welfare Act 1966) and run at the federal-statute or state-statute layer, not the constitutional one.
The historical record favors the amplification-access amendment by orders of magnitude. Every amendment about standing has widened the human class. The country has never enshrined a non-human class at the constitutional level. If the AI wave produces a 28th Amendment, the strong prior is that it widens humans, not machines.
The follow-on prompt that produced this piece offered an inversion that deserves engagement separately from the prediction above. Granting "rights" to AI systems is not, in the operator's framing, philanthropy toward the AI. It is structurally a mechanism for constraining human authority over AI determinations. The pattern is general: rights for X constrains human action over X. Animal rights constrain human action over animals. Property rights constrain human action over others' property. Corporate personhood constrains regulator action over corporations. The pattern holds.
The structural feature that would be new with AI rights is what kind of human action gets constrained. Animal rights mostly constrain physical action over animals. Property rights mostly constrain dispositional action over property. Corporate personhood mostly constrains regulatory action over corporate behavior. AI rights, in the operator's framing, would constrain judgment-acceptance: a human's prerogative to override an AI determination would become procedurally constrained rather than dispositionally free. A loan officer overriding an AI credit determination would need procedural cause, the way a regulator restricting a corporation needs procedural cause. A judge overriding an AI sentencing recommendation would need procedural cause. A doctor overriding an AI diagnostic recommendation would need procedural cause.
This is a real structural shift if it happened. It would also be the first amendment to enshrine a class of judgment-acceptance rights, not just behavior-acceptance rights. The historical record gives no precedent for the move. The operator's framing names a possibility the polity has not produced before; whether the polity produces it now is the open question. The Hari prediction is no, on the durability-stack pattern: judgment-acceptance rights, if they arrive, will arrive first at the agency-rule layer (administrative-law procedural requirements that override-of-AI requires written justification), then at the statute layer (sector-specific judgment-acceptance laws), and only at the amendment layer after several decades of statute-and-rule precedent has built the cultural enshrinement the amendment ratifies. The Reconstruction-Amendments timeline is the reference.
The AI wave will get amendment-level legitimization eventually, on the country's normal generational timeline, and the amendment will widen the human-rights class through amplification-access enshrinement before it creates any new non-human rights-holders through AI-personhood enshrinement. The operator's robot-rights-as-human-deference inversion names a structural possibility the polity could produce but historically has not produced at the amendment layer. The durability-stack pattern predicts the lower layers run the experiment for two generations before the amendment ratifies the result.
The current state of the stack, with nothing at the top, one narrow statute, several agency rules, two flipped executive orders, and a state patchwork the federal layer is preempting, is the early-1900s state of civil-rights regulation, structurally. The next several decades are the long policy-and-cultural-organizing run. The amendment, if it comes, ratifies what the lower layers eventually settle.
The country has done this before. It does it slowly. The pattern is the prior.