Interruptive Authority and the Limits of Alignment

Contemporary discussions of autonomous systems assume that meaningful human oversight can be secured through alignment mechanisms. If a system reliably tracks human values, control is taken to be preserved. This paper argues that such an assumption overlooks a structural condition of delegation. Alignment concerns the content of objectives; delegation concerns authorization—who retains the standing to suspend pursuit of those ends. When the standards governing suspension are internal to the same evaluative structure that governs continuation, authorization becomes mediated through optimization. The paper develops the concept of interruptive authority as a necessary structural asymmetry: the retained standing to suspend continuation that is neither derivable from nor evaluated within the delegated system's optimization criteria. The argument is illustrated through analysis of epistemic dependence and architectural complexity, and implications for institutional design are considered. Alignment may be necessary for safe delegation, but it is not sufficient to preserve retained authority.