Governance Failure Prior to Identifiable Risk under AI-Mediated Judgment Formation

Contemporary AI governance frameworks focus predominantly on identifiable risks arising from model outputs, system capabilities, or post-hoc harms. This paper identifies a distinct and upstream failure mode: governance breakdown occurring prior to identifiable risk, at the level of AI-mediated judgment formation. When probabilistic language systems participate in shaping human interpretation, confidence, framing, and relevance—without being recognised as a causal substrate—risk is displaced rather than detected. This paper situates this failure within established scientific and sociotechnical literature, demonstrating that the phenomenon is neither speculative nor ethical, but a structural misclassification arising from the interaction between human judgment, institutional procedures, and AI-mediated language systems.