The Magnitsky Model for AI: Localized Legislative Cascades as a Response to AI-Driven Circumvention of International Law

International law's enforcement architecture is state-centric and treaty-mediated, and both features are now liabilities. Multilateral treaty-making is too slow to track the development of artificial intelligence and too rigid to be corrected once concluded, while the conduct it must govern is increasingly executed not by states but by private systems that diffuse accountability across a corporate form and an algorithmic one. This paper argues that AI has become the perfected proxy: a deniable, jurisdictionally slippery, self-executing intermediary through which individuals, corporations and states can circumvent international-legal norms while remaining formally unaccountable. Extending the author's prior work on the unregulated character of economic warfare, it contends that the appropriate response is not a new global instrument but its opposite — localised, targeted national legislation on the model of the Sergei Magnitsky and Global Magnitsky Acts. Personal and entity-level measures with extraterritorial bite do not require the consent of the wrongdoer's state; they attach to individuals and firms, and they cascade through the global financial and market network — dollar clearing, correspondent banking, compliance de-risking and regulatory emulation — to produce de facto harmonisation faster than any convention. The paper develops the treaty-rigidity problem; theorises AI as an accountability-diffusing "double veil"; explains the cascade mechanics of Magnitsky-style designation; and proposes, as an original contribution, a doctrinal mechanism of AI-conduct-triggered designation keyed to responsible control rather than to a completed, attributable human wrong. It tests the proposal against worked scenarios and against the strongest objections — sovereignty, over-reach, fragmentation and due process — and offers honest, rather than merely defensive, responses. Preprint; not yet peer reviewed.