AI as an Intellectual Tool: Responsibility-Chain Continuity and Capability-Based Governance in the Age of Autonomous Systems

Contemporary AI-safety discourse often places advanced AI in the exceptional position of a potential responsible subject, as if autonomy, complexity, and unpredictability required a new philosophy of governance and responsibility. This paper argues for taking AI off that pedestal and placing it in a more accurate governance niche: AI is an intellectual tool that augments the intelligence of natural or juridical persons, not the terminal bearer of responsibility. As with automobiles, aircraft, and other complex technologies, introducing a tool may redistribute duties and liability among users, providers, manufacturers, and deployers, but responsibility can be allocated around the tool, not into the tool itself. AI safety should therefore be governed by extending existing logics of responsibility allocation, licensing, and control of dangerous capabilities rather than by inventing a jurisprudence for an unprecedented alien intelligence. Regulatory intensity should follow the consequential capabilities that responsible persons can obtain through AI, robots, and other tools; hazardous materials, dangerous equipment, hazardous facilities, and access to their control should remain subject to the familiar logic of licensing, containment, permission boundaries, auditing, and liability used for high-risk activities. Intelligence is not itself a dangerous capability; the relevant question is what dangerous capabilities intelligence can access and control. The governance of dangerous capability should not be mistaken for the governance of intelligence itself.