What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to highlight the difference between ethics and practical safety in AI tools.

February 12, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Knife Alignment: Why Moralizing AI Is as Absurd as Aligning Knives (Technical Note / Preprint)

KEKirill EgorychevApplied Logic Laboratory (Hungary)

Key Points

The aim is to highlight the difference between ethics and practical safety in AI tools.
Analyzed the relationship between text-level ethics and action-level safety in AI.
Identified failures in AI as boundary and permissioning failures rather than moral failures.
Clarified that many AI failures stem from context collapse.
Stressed that moralizing AI does not address practical safety challenges.

Abstract

This is the canonical technical version of “Knife Alignment”. It argues that text-level “ethics” is not equivalent to action-level safety, and that many failures are boundary/permissioning failures (“context collapse”) rather than “moral” failures of the tool. The Russian PDF is a companion translation. Suggested citation: Egorychev, K. (2026). Knife Alignment: Why Moralizing AI Is as Absurd as Aligning Knives (Technical Note / Preprint). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18591626 Discussion links will be added in subsequent versions.

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