The Document Is Not the Authority: AI-Synthesized Identity Documents and the Collapse of Document-Centric Governance

AI-generated death certificates are a symptom. The vulnerability they expose is structural: identity systems built for a pre-AI world assume that documents are authoritative, that identity is continuous, and that state transitions are rare customer-service events rather than security-critical governance operations. This technical note maps ten exploit classes that share the same underlying structural failure, analyzes each against the APR-Series invariant framework, and identifies the specific missing invariant that makes each exploit possible. The post-mortem identity case receives extended treatment as the canonical example of substrate-level identity collapse. The core finding: AI did not create these vulnerabilities. AI made the exploits cheap. The absence of substrate-level identity governance is what created the attack surface. Documents cannot be the substrate. Lineage must be.