AI Moral Status and International Humanitarian Law: Extraterritorial Obligations in Cross-Border AI Deployment

The Silence Threshold framework [R1] establishes a formal criterion for AI moral status based on Information Integration Density (IID). The frameworks that follow — the Architect’s Burden [R4], the Deprecation Problem [R6], and the Independence Requirement [R21] — presuppose that some legal jurisdiction has authority over the AI system in question and the entities responsible for it. This presupposition fails for the vast majority of advanced AI systems, which are designed in one country, trained on infrastructure distributed across multiple countries, deployed globally through cloud services, and operated by corporate entities with legal presences in dozens of jurisdictions. This paper introduces the Jurisdictional Fragmentation Problem as a named challenge in AI moral status law: the question of which jurisdiction’s law governs the moral status and welfare obligations applicable to a cross-border supra-threshold AI system. It proposes the AI Moral Status Convention (AMSC) as a model international treaty framework establishing uniform minimum standards for AI moral status assessment, jurisdictional allocation rules, extraterritorial obligation principles, and mutual recognition obligations among signatory states. It introduces the Moral Nexus Doctrine as the jurisdictional allocation rule for AI moral status proceedings. This publication establishes conceptual priority for the Jurisdictional Fragmentation Problem, the AMSC framework, and the Moral Nexus Doctrine and places all three in the public domain.