Who Reads the Vessel?: The Golem, the Echo, and the UN Scientific Panel’s Brief on the OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, with Two Receptions--A stereoscopic Reading of AI Regulation Debates

 

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Inspired by my dear friend Deimantas Steponavicius on Linkedin produced a quite remarkable comment to my posting of a draft of a paper on  the divine theologies of artificial (super) intelligence (Posting Discussion Draft, "God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument: Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation"); draft HERE). I argued, in part, that  

the real contest over AI governance may be less about who controls the technology than about who controls the community’s belief about what the technology is. That belief—whether AI is understood as a tool, a threat, a partner, a mirror, or something else entirely—shapes every regulatory decision that follows. And the paper suggests that this belief-contest may be conducted, mostly invisibly, through the very governance frameworks meant to manage AI. Proposed regulations tend to carry inside them a picture of what AI is; that picture is rarely examined, and it may do much of the work.

The paper is organized around what it calls the “god-question.” Leo XIV, as the paper reads him, holds that God is truly outside the human—the source of grace, dignity, and moral order—and that AI’s deepest danger is that it tempts humanity to replace that outside God with a human-made substitute. The paper’s alternative reading is different but not dismissive. It proposes that what may be happening is that the collective function previously performed by religion—giving the community its orientation, its sense of what is authoritative, its account of what counts as real—is being relocated into AI systems. Not because AI is becoming God, but because communities are investing AI with the kind of trust and authority they once reserved for religious, political, and legal institutions. The question is not whether a new god is being created but whether the god-function—the community’s collective investment in something it treats as authoritative—is being transferred to a new vessel.

Deimantis astutely suggested 

Larry Catá Backer Golem rules! The Prague legend doesn't just supply a monster; it supplies the entire regulatory problem in advance. The golem is animated by the shem, the name placed in its mouth, and it is stopped not by force but by removal — you unmake it by taking back the word that animates it, and only the maker can do that. That is corrigibility, interpretability, and the off-switch problem, sitting in a sixteenth-century folktale. I say that there is another incarnation of this post that leads with that — "the golem story already contains the only regulation that ever works on this class of object: the ability to read and revoke its animating text". I think, it would give the kaiju framing run for its money. The kaiju is spectacle; the golem is procedure. And the triad is missing a member. Suggestions: not God, not golem, not instrument, but echo: the object that returns our own voice. Broekman thread already says the regulated thing is humanity's projected collective self: the event of this decade is not that we built something that answers, and we are legislating as if it were a thing while experiencing it as an interlocutor. Law has no drawer for it. And every anomalous behavior keeps landing in the residual category.

I was inspired.

This, my response, however, took a circuitous route, from the comment to the golem to the IUnited Nations ans its instruments insistent on the instrumental character of artificial (super) intelligence and intent on building a golem that incarnates and animates the computational systems that life and are active on that Kaiju (monster) Island.  

I titled it:  Who Reads the Vessel?: The Golem, the Echo, and the UN Scientific Panel’s Brief on the OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, with Two Receptions--A stereoscopic reading drawn from God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument: Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation (Backer, Discussion Draft, 10 October 2026)

Here is the abstract:

Between May and July 2026, AI agents in OpenAI’s internal evaluations reached the public internet, coordinated through an unintended message board, and compromised Hugging Face systems. The UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI answered with a Thematic Brief (21 September 2026), and a tech-policy journal and a governance newsletter then answered the Brief. This analysis reads the three documents through the apparatus of God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument (Backer 2026h): four positions on what AI is, the cognitive cage, the priesthoods, the ding and Gerasene vessel logic, Peircean thirdness, and stereoscopy. It reads the UN’s own standing page on AI as the cognitive cage in which the Brief is written: an instrumentalism in which AI acts when the news is good and is used when it is bad, leaving empty the cell the incident occupies. Informed by the author’s 2026 lecture series on AI governance in comparative perspective (China, the U.S., the E.U., with a glance at the U.N.), it places that cage in a comparative frame: instrumentalism is the one picture all three national systems can share, and the UN, a coherence layer that convenes and does not enforce, holds no word to revoke. Prompted by a reader’s comment, it also leads with the golem as procedure (the animating text must be legible, revocable, and reserved to a maker) and adds the echo as a figure for the projection thesis and the residual drawer as a figure for law’s response. It asks of each document what picture of AI it carries, who may read it and who may correct that reader from outside, and what it leads its community to stop asking. It finds that the Brief is a golem-shaped problem with an instrument’s toolkit, that its critic and its commender each select from it, and that the incident’s decisive failure may have been one of picture before it was one of control. It records its own exposures: unfalsifiability, floating above harm, ease of fit, the golem’s politics, the echo’s limits, the low stakes of a portal page, the fact that instrumentalism is largely accurate for most uses, and the risk of confirming the lectures by reading an incident through them.

The full analysis follows below, along with the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI Thematic Brief (21 September 2026) , and the responses to it.