AI OSI: Foundational Legitimacy Questions

This technical note introduces AI OSI: Foundational Legitimacy Questions, a concise, question-based framework that defines the minimum conditions under which an artificial intelligence system may claim ethical, legal, and institutional legitimacy. Derived from the AI OSI Stack, the document enumerates foundational questions across the AI lifecycle, including civic mandate, physical and compute substrate, data stewardship, model development, instruction and control, interface protocols, deployment context, and long-term governance. The framework is intentionally non-prescriptive. It does not propose controls, architectures, metrics, or compliance mechanisms, and it provides no answers. Instead, the document shifts the burden of justification to system designers, deployers, and institutional custodians. Where credible, reconstructable answers cannot be produced, legitimacy claims are treated as invalid regardless of system performance, scale, or adoption. The note is non-operational, vendor-neutral, and designed for evaluative use, citation, and critical review by institutions, boards, auditors, regulators, researchers, and standards-adjacent bodies. It complements existing AI OSI publications by articulating the foundational legitimacy threshold that precedes governance design, risk management, or compliance assessment.