Thermodynamic Limits of Behavioral Alignment: Landauer Constraints and Heat Dissipation in Embodied AI Safety Systems

Thermodynamic Limits of Behavioral Alignment: Landauer Constraints and Heat Dissipation in Embodied AI Safety Systems This companion paper to "The Phonon Sink" examines the fundamental physical costs of real-time behavioral drift mitigation in humanoid robots. While isolation architectures such as the Phonon Sink effectively protect core neural models from high-entropy human inputs (raised voices, contradictory commands, emotional outbursts), the irreversible erasure of this toxic data incurs a thermodynamic penalty governed by Landauer's Principle. We derive the net entropy accumulation rate by coupling information-theoretic entropy generation with conductive heat dissipation through the robot's chassis (using Fourier's Law). A detailed material analysis compares carbon fiber, titanium, and aluminum substrates, revealing significant differences in sustainable erasure capacity. We further define a three-tier homeostatic throttling protocol to prevent thermal runaway and discuss pathways toward reversible computing architectures that can reduce Landauer overhead. This work provides quantitative guidance for hardware-software co-design, emphasizing that sustainable embodied AI safety requires concurrent optimization of algorithmic isolation and physical thermal management. **Companion Paper:** The Phonon Sink: Mitigating Behavioral Drift in Real-World Humanoid Robotics (Zenodo, May 23, 2026)