Beyond Control: Theory of Limits of AI Governance — An Analytical Synthesis

AI governance has failed to produce effective oversight not because regulators are incompetent or developers are dishonest, but because the institutional architectures deployed for this purpose are structurally incapable of performing the function assigned to them. This synthesis draws on twelve analytical essays produced between February and May 2026 to establish a single structural finding: three limits — sovereign override, material predetermination, and institutional mismatch — operate simultaneously on any AI governance architecture, and their interaction is multiplicative rather than additive. When all three limits are active, the corrective capacity of governance does not decline gradually; it collapses below the threshold at which meaningful correction remains operationally viable. What follows from this finding is not a policy roadmap. It is a repositioning: from asking how to build better governance to asking what remains available for constraint when the correction window has already closed.