Alignment → Capability Control → Human Authority

As artificial intelligence systems develop from generators of information into autonomous agents capable of acting upon digital and physical environments, an increasingly important question emerges: Should the intelligence deciding what to do also possess authority over the boundaries of what it is allowed to do? Existing work in AI safety, AI control, corrigibility, least privilege, zero-trust architecture and agent security approaches different parts of this problem. Contemporary security guidance increasingly recommends external authorization, limited privileges and deterministic controls for autonomous agents. This paper presents a thought experiment built around a three-layer model: Alignment → Capability Control → Human Authority. It examines the Droste Problem of Semantic Oversight, capability composition, distributed capability, control-plane integrity, collusion, and the problem of completeness in adversarial safety analysis. The central question is how much freedom to reason can be given to an artificial intelligence without also giving it authority over the boundaries of its own freedom.