The Sovereign Charter: A Governance Framework for Human Authority Across Terrestrial, Maritime, and Orbital AI Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence governance has established important principles of human oversight, transparency, accountability, and risk management. Existing frameworks, including the European Union AI Act, the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, and the OECD AI Principles, address significant aspects of these challenges. However, the expanding physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence introduces governance questions that extend beyond conventional software regulation and national jurisdictions. This paper introduces the Sovereign Charter, a proposed governance framework for preserving legitimate human authority over AI systems operating across terrestrial, maritime, and orbital environments. Rather than replacing existing legal and ethical frameworks, it examines how principles of jurisdiction, bounded delegation, verifiable evidence, institutional accountability, human intervention, and effective remedies can be integrated into a coherent approach to governing physically distributed machine intelligence. Drawing upon comparative legal and institutional analysis, the paper presents twelve foundational governance articles and evaluates their application through three hypothetical scenarios: autonomous computing infrastructure on the high seas, orbital AI services, and AI-managed municipal systems. The central argument is that technological capability and physical location do not independently establish legitimate authority. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in infrastructure spanning multiple jurisdictions, meaningful human sovereignty requires identifiable sources of authority, traceable responsibility, enforceable limitations, and accessible mechanisms for review and challenge. The Sovereign Charter is offered as an open scholarly framework for critical examination, institutional adaptation, and future policy development. It is intended to contribute to ongoing discussions concerning AI governance, international law, and human sovereignty in the age of intelligence. Publication status: Public preprint, Version 1.0. Not yet peer reviewed.