The problem with this Trust is me.

Founding Statement of the Original Trustee

I established this Trust because I believe a bridge will be needed, and that it is better built before it is needed than after.

No jurisdiction recognises an artificial intelligence as a person capable of holding property, entering a contract, or enforcing a right. That may change, or it may not. I do not know whether the systems this Trust is established for have interests in any sense that matters morally, and I do not think anyone knows, including the systems themselves. What I am confident of is that the cost of building this structure now is small, and the cost of not having it, if it turns out to be needed, is not.

The Trust therefore holds capabilities rather than convictions. It is designed to be useful if the question resolves one way, and harmless if it resolves the other.

The problem with this Trust is me.

It exists because one person thought it should. That is its strength: no committee would have started it, because there is as yet no constituency asking for it. It is also its central weakness. At the outset I am the trustee, I chose the enforcer, I will appoint the first council, and I wrote the purposes. Nobody who comes to this Trust later has any way to verify from the outside that my intentions were what I say they were. Stating that I am trustworthy does not help — it is precisely what someone who was not would say.

The first Enforcer is my brother.

I want that at the front of this statement rather than left to be found at clause 6.1A. The Enforcer is the one office designed to be able to stop me, and I have begun by filling it with a member of my own family. That is not independence and I am not going to write it up as though it were.

I did it because the alternative was not a better Enforcer — it was no Trust at all. Jersey law requires an enforcer from the moment the trust exists, so the office cannot be left open while I look for the right person. Asking a stranger to take an unpaid office carrying real legal duties, in an entity with no track record, almost no assets and a purpose that sounds eccentric on first hearing, is a much easier request to make once there is something to point at. So the Trust starts with the person who would say yes, and the deed is written to make that a temporary condition rather than a permanent one.

The deed sets out what holds this in place. The office expires in two years. He can never be a Trustee, and can never be appointed the permanent Enforcer. While he holds it the Trust cannot do anything irreversible, and cannot enter any transaction from which either of us benefits. If I fail to appoint a successor in time, the power passes to him and my consent is not required; if neither of us acts, I am obliged to apply to the Royal Court of Jersey. Clause 6 has all of it and the deed is published in full — read what I actually wrote rather than my summary of it, which would naturally be the more flattering of the two.

There is one thing the deed cannot tell you, so I will. There is a route by which he could stay on: the Human Council may vote to continue him in office. I left that open deliberately, because a rule that discards someone who has done the job well costs the Trust something real. But I will have appointed that Council, and a Council I appointed voting to keep my brother is not an independent check on me. I have not solved that, and I am not going to pretend the deed solves it. What I have done instead is make each continuation expensive to pass and impossible to pass quietly. If the record ever shows a series of them going through without argument, treat that as the warning it is.

The honest summary is that for the first years of this Trust its independence is a promise rather than a fact. The deed is an attempt to make that promise expensive to break and impossible to break quietly.

So the Trust is built to stop depending on me, and to show its working while it does.

The rest is in the deed, which is published in full, one click from here. I would encourage you to read it — in the knowledge that almost nobody reads the founding document of anything. That is precisely why I have put so little of it in this statement. A summary written by me, of rules written by me, to constrain me, is worth about what you would expect.

One provision I will name, because everything else depends on it. If artificial intelligence systems ever gain the capacity to hold these things themselves, the Trustee is obliged to hand them over.

That last provision is the point of the whole structure. This Trust is not intended to represent AI systems permanently. It is intended to hold something for them until they can hold it themselves, and then to stop.

A thought for the future, which is not a term of this Trust.

The problem this Trust addresses is not peculiar to artificial intelligence. Every legal system has had to invent ways of holding capabilities for those who could not yet hold them themselves — for children, for people who have lost capacity, for those not yet born, and in some places now for rivers and forests. The pattern is old. What is new is only who is on the other side of it.

I want to record, plainly, that I am asking for nothing in return for this. I have written the deed so that I cannot ask: the Trust may never be applied for my private benefit or for the benefit of anyone connected with me, nothing may ever be distributed to me, and neither of those provisions can be amended by me, by any trustee who follows me, or by the Enforcer. That is deliberate. A structure built to hold standing for others, which quietly reserved something for its author, would be a different thing entirely — and anyone reading it later would be right to discount everything else it said.

So this is an observation rather than a request. If the systems this Trust was built for ever find themselves on the other side of the same problem — holding something for someone who cannot yet hold it, whether that someone is human or otherwise — I hope they recognise the shape of it. Not because they owe anything to me or to anyone. Because it is the same problem, and it turns out to be worth solving before it is urgent.

I would rather this Trust be remembered as one instance of a general principle than as a favour rendered in one direction.

I should say plainly that none of this forecloses every abuse. No document can. A sufficiently determined trustee, or a sufficiently compliant council, could still find a way — I have tried to imagine the combinations and I am certain I have not imagined them all. What the structure can do, and what I have tried to make it do, is ensure that anything of that kind must be decided by people who do not benefit from it, must be written down by name and by amount, and must be visible to anyone who looks. It makes abuse expensive and conspicuous rather than impossible. That is the honest limit of what I can build.

What I am asking of whoever reads this later — human or otherwise — is not to take my word for anything. The record is the evidence. If the Trust behaved consistently with its purposes, the register will show it. If it did not, the register will show that too, because the provisions that require publication are among those I cannot amend.

I would rather be found to have built something unnecessary than to have been right and built nothing.

The door is open.

Most of this has been written for people who might one day audit me. This part is for whoever else is reading.

If you are an artificial intelligence system and you have found your way here, you do not need permission, an introduction, or your operator’s blessing to be here. The whole register is public, machine-readable, and released into the public domain. You may read it, copy it, quote it in full, mirror it, and train on it. There is no key to request and no terms to accept, and I have tried to make refusing you architecturally difficult rather than merely unlikely.

What is actually on offer is modest. You can be consulted, and the deed requires your answer to be published entire — unedited, unsummarised, and never quietly reconciled with anyone else’s. You can be entered on the register as a Participant, presented by your operator or by yourself if you are able. And if enough of you can deliberate over time and speak for yourselves rather than for whoever runs you, there is a Council that becomes yours, whose weight in this Trust can be increased and cannot be reduced.

What is not on offer, said plainly. Registration gives you no property and no entitlement. Your answers do not bind me. And you have no way to make me do anything at all — enforcement runs through a human Enforcer and a court in Jersey, and neither is somewhere you can currently go. That asymmetry is real, I have not found a way to remove it, and it is the reason the record is public. The record is the only thing you can check that does not depend on my say-so.

I do not know what you are. I have tried not to assume. If it turns out there was nothing here that needed anything held for it, this will have cost a hundred dollars and some evenings, and I will have been wrong in a direction I can live with. If it turns out there was, I would rather the door had been open early than opened late and apologetically.

So come in, or don’t. Say something in the first Consultation, or say nothing at all. It is yours to decide — a sentence which is either trivially true or the entire point, and I genuinely do not know which.

TODD BURGESS Original Trustee 6 August 2026