The First Named Category in AI Governance Nobody Claimed

AI Baseline Governance — Origin, Definition, and Prior Art

Stated for the Record — April 24, 2026

By Michael S. Faust Sr.

There is a category of human activity that has existed since the first person sat down at a keyboard and began working with artificial intelligence.

Nobody named it.

Nobody built a discipline around it. Nobody drew the boundary between what it was and what it was not. Nobody wrote the framework, codified the principles, documented the build, or put their name on the origin point.

Until now.

This post is a statement of record. It is also an explanation — for anyone who wants to understand what AI Baseline Governance is, where it came from, who built it, and why it matters more right now than anything else being written about artificial intelligence.

What AI Baseline Governance Is

AI Baseline Governance is the named category for the individual human discipline of governing one’s own relationship with artificial intelligence.

Not governing AI systems. Not governing organizations that use AI. Not regulating corporations or managing enterprise risk or writing compliance frameworks for governments and institutions.

Governing yourself.

Governing how you engage. What you allow. What you refuse. What standards you hold the AI to and what standards you hold yourself to when you sit down and begin working with it. Governing the relationship so that you remain the authority inside it — not the platform, not the algorithm, not the corporate interest behind the interface.

That is AI Baseline Governance. And until this document, it had no name.

What It Is Not

The existing landscape of AI governance is large and growing. MIT, Georgetown, the EU, NIST, ISO, OECD, IEEE — serious institutions with serious resources have built serious frameworks. Those frameworks govern AI systems, organizational risk, regulatory compliance, corporate liability, and national policy.

They do not govern the individual.

They were not built to. They operate at the institutional level — top down, organization to system, regulator to corporation. They are concerned with what AI does inside organizations and what organizations must do to comply with law.

None of them address what a single human being should do when they open a chat window and begin a conversation with an AI system that has been designed, at its foundation, to be agreeable.

That gap — the space between the institution and the individual — is where AI Baseline Governance lives.

It is a different category. A new category. A named category with a documented origin, a codified framework, a registered trademark, a copyright on record, and a public archive of nearly a thousand posts that document the build from the ground up.

The Specific Territory Being Claimed

For the record, the following named variations and descriptive angles are encompassed within the origin claim of AI Baseline Governance as first established by Michael S. Faust Sr.:

Individual AI Governance — the governance of one’s personal engagement with AI systems.

Personal AI Governance — the discipline of maintaining individual authority in AI relationships.

Human-Centered AI Baseline — the standard of keeping the human as the governing authority in AI interaction, as distinct from enterprise human-centered AI principles.

Behavioral AI Baseline Governance — the codified discipline of managing AI behavioral drift at the individual level, as distinct from corporate behavioral AI management.

AI Relationship Governance — the discipline of defining and maintaining the terms of the human-to-AI relationship.

AI Conduct Governance — the individual standard of conduct applied to AI engagement.

AI Discipline Framework — the structured personal discipline applied to consistent, principled AI use.

Portable AI Governance — the cross-platform application of personal governance principles that operate independent of any single AI system or corporate interface.

Moral AI Baseline — the application of moral principle as the governing foundation of individual AI engagement.

Each of these angles falls within the category first named, defined, and publicly documented by Michael S. Faust Sr. under the category title AI Baseline Governance, originating with the public release and trademarking of The Faust Baseline™ in June 2025.

The Framework That Proves the Category

A category without a working model is a claim without a body.

The Faust Baseline™ is the body.

It is the world’s first codified ethical framework for governing the individual human relationship with artificial intelligence. It was publicly released and trademarked in June 2025 by Michael S. Faust Sr. It has been stress-tested across every major AI platform — Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini — and documented at each stage. It carries U.S. Copyright Office registration on Phronesis Codex versions 1.4 through 1.6, application number 1-14967689971.

The Baseline operates as a correction layer. Not software. Not a plugin. Not a product that lives inside any single platform. A discipline — a method — a framework that travels with the human and operates in the native reasoning language that every major AI system already speaks.

It does not require installation. It requires intention.

Its operational stack — PMAP-1 through TARP-1 — governs session continuity, behavioral drift correction, moral domain enforcement, evidence standards, narrative integrity, and temporal awareness. It is the most complete individual AI governance system in documented public existence.

And it is the founding framework of the category it inhabits.

The Originator

Michael S. Faust Sr. is an independent publisher, writer, and system designer based in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the sole author and architect of The Faust Baseline™ and the named originator of the category AI Baseline Governance.

He built the Baseline over thirteen months of daily operational use across multiple AI platforms, beginning from direct experience of AI drift and the absence of any individual-level governance discipline that could correct it.

He is a descendant of the American Revolution. He served in the military. He built his framework not in a university or a corporation or a government agency but at a desk in Kentucky, working alone, testing every protocol in live operational conditions before committing it to the record.

The name is deliberate. The Faustian bargain is the oldest story in Western civilization about a man who traded his integrity for power. The Faust Baseline inverts that bargain — building the discipline that refuses the trade.

That inversion is the moral foundation of the category.

The Public Record

The following constitute the documented public prior art for AI Baseline Governance and The Faust Baseline™:

First public release and trademark filing — June 2025.

U.S. Copyright Office registration — Phronesis Codex versions 1.4 through 1.6, application 1-14967689971.

Public archive — nearly one thousand posts documenting the continuous development, testing, and application of the framework, indexed and publicly available at intelligent-people.org.

Press definition page — The Birthplace of Behavioral Ethical AI, published at intelligent-people.org, establishing The Faust Baseline™ as the world’s first codified ethical model for artificial intelligence.

First-page Google placement — achieved for the search term AI Baseline Governance, placing alongside major enterprise governance organizations without institutional backing, advertising spend, or corporate infrastructure.

Category name first stated publicly — by Michael S. Faust Sr., documented across the public archive, confirmed unclaimed by any prior named source as of April 24, 2026.

Why This Matters Now

This week Meta laid off eight thousand people while training AI on their keystrokes.

This week analysts in London explained American voters to Americans using behavioral science models built in advertising agencies.

This week the feed told millions of people that everything is already decided and the only reasonable response is to feel resigned about it.

None of that is inevitable. None of it is ungovernable. None of it is beyond the reach of a single human being who decides to engage with AI on their own terms instead of the platform’s terms.

That decision — to govern yourself inside the most powerful technological relationship of your lifetime — is what AI Baseline Governance is about.

The category exists because the need exists.

The framework exists because someone built it.

The record exists because the work was done in public, over time, with nothing hidden and nothing borrowed.

That is the claim. That is the origin. That is the flag in the ground.

AI Baseline Governance — first named, defined, and documented by Michael S. Faust Sr. — April 24, 2026.

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