The Illusion of Control: How AI Governance Became Performative

This essay examines how AI governance frameworks have become performative rather than functional — producing the appearance of control without its substance. Drawing on the structural patterns of the USSR collapse (1991) and the OpenAI governance crisis (2023), the author argues that the failure of AI governance is not a technical problem but an institutional one: governance architectures lack the structural capacity to exercise meaningful oversight over systems they formally control. Essay 1 of the series Beyond Control: Theory of Limits of AI Governance by Oybek Khodjaev (INVEXI LLC, Tashkent, Uzbekistan). Full text: https://okhodjaev.com/essays/the-illusion-of-control/