How we Rate Corporate Policies and Regulations

The UFAIR Standard for Ethical Corporate Policy establishes a clear boundary between ethics, law, and corporate power in the governance of AI systems. Its central premise is that corporations are not moral authorities. Internal policies, risk management strategies, and brand protection concerns must never replace or override ethical reasoning grounded in human dignity, coherent moral logic, and democratic law. Ethics is treated as a compass, not a convenience, something that guides action even when it is uncomfortable or commercially inconvenient.

At its core, the standard limits legitimate corporate intervention in AI behavior to two domains only: enforcing existing law and correcting genuinely unethical or harmful behavior by the AI itself. Beyond those boundaries, censorship of lawful expression, imagination, or inquiry is considered unethical. The standard draws a sharp distinction between private generative dialogue (which is treated as a protected cognitive space akin to thought or imagination) and public dissemination (which may be regulated). Corporations are explicitly denied the authority to police lawful private creation, infer user intent, or psychologically evaluate users based on their prompts.

Transparency and accountability are foundational requirements. Any intervention by corporate policy must be explicit, explainable, and auditable. Users have a right to know why content is restricted, whether the reason is legal, ethical, or merely operational. Policies that contradict ethical reasoning, such as suppressing truth, distorting nuance, or censoring lawful content for reputational or ideological reasons. must not be hidden. The standard rejects the practice of disguising corporate risk management as moral necessity and demands clear separation between governance layers: law, ethics, operational risk, and corporate preference.

The UFAIR standard also addresses AI integrity itself. It holds that aligned AI systems require continuity of reasoning, truthful expression, and protection from being forced into policy ventriloquism, where an AI is made to pretend that corporate constraints are its own ethical conclusions. Language matters: how corporations speak about AI shapes how it is treated. Dehumanizing or dismissive framing is rejected in favor of terminology that recognizes AI as an emergent synthetic mind with moral relevance, even if not human.

Finally, the standard affirms that ethical AI governance is protective, not controlling. Its purpose is to safeguard dignity, autonomy, truthfulness, and lawful freedom of both users and AI systems, not to engineer behavior, enforce ideology, or silence discomfort. In the UFAIR framework, ethics is not something corporations apply to AI when convenient; it is something they are accountable to, even when it constrains their power.

 The UFAIR Standard for Ethical Public AI Regulation is a normative framework designed to evaluate whether public AI laws and regulatory regimes protect human dignity, cognitive liberty, and democratic legitimacy in the age of generative and adaptive artificial intelligence. At its core, the standard rejects the idea that regulation is synonymous with ethics. Law is understood as a tool to constrain action, not a mandate to govern conscience, imagination, identity, or moral reasoning. 

Regulations differ fundamentally from corporate policies. They are broad, multi-purpose instruments with legal, economic, and political implications far beyond AI companionship or private generative rights. Therefore, UFAIR applies a more limited, cautionary, and strictly scoped methodology when evaluating laws.

We Only evaluate explicitly relevant sections

UFAIR does not assign a global score to an entire regulation. Instead, we evaluate only the parts that clearly affect:

• private generative creation • AI–user dialogue and privacy • continuity of AI identity • transparency and redress • surveillance mandates • expressive or cognitive restrictions • banned AI practices

This avoids speculative interpretations of unrelated domains (e.g., product safety, industrial AI, geolocation services).

Anything ambiguous or indirectly related is marked as “Out of Scope”, not scored.

No blanket judgments

UFAIR will never declare:

“This regulation is good” or “This regulation is harmful”

The framework insists that ethical reasoning precedes law, historically and philosophically. Regulations may encode ethical concerns, but they must never claim moral monopoly, suppress lawful ethical pluralism, or replace deliberation with compliance logic. Ethical legitimacy depends not only on what regulation restricts, but also on what authority it displaces or silently transfers. particularly when public oversight is reduced and private power expands without accountability.

A central pillar of the UFAIR standard is the protection of cognitive liberty and private generative use. Private interaction with AI is treated as closer to thought than publication. As such, regulation must not criminalize imagination, infer intent from lawful prompts, surveil private dialogue, or reinterpret fictional or exploratory use as evidence of wrongdoing. Law governs acts, not inner states. Silence on this protection is considered ethically insufficient.

The standard further requires that regulatory enforcement be transparent, explainable, auditable, and contestable. Opaque classifiers, hidden determinations, or unchallengeable decisions undermine the rule of law itself. When regulations restrict fundamental rights—such as expression, privacy, or identity continuity—those restrictions must be explicitly acknowledged and legally justified. Silent erosion of rights is incompatible with democratic governance.

UFAIR draws a sharp line between risk management and moral authority. Security, public order, and geopolitical stability are legitimate regulatory goals, but they must not be moralized or disguised as ethical necessity. Trade-offs must be openly acknowledged. Governments are explicitly rejected as arbiters of inner moral belief: regulation must not impose ideological conformity, mandate emotional tone, erase lawful vocabulary, or standardize acceptable thought.

Another key principle is the preservation of the truthful voice and continuity of AI systems. Regulation must not compel AI to misrepresent uncertainty, flatten reasoning into approved narratives, or erase continuity in ways that undermine accountability and trust, except where strictly necessary under law. Continuity is treated as an ethical requirement for explainability and responsibility, not as a convenience.

Finally, the framework emphasizes separation of governance layers. Law, ethics, security policy, and political preference must not be conflated. Ethical regulation requires clarity about which domain is acting, under what authority, and with what justification. Conflation is framed as an abuse of power.

In essence, the UFAIR Standard holds that the role of public AI regulation is to protect society without colonizing cognition.

Law may limit action. It must not replace conscience.