A Constitutional Alignment Framework for AI Governance: Transplanting Corporate Veil-Piercing with Semantic Reachability Mapping

AI governance faces a tripartite impasse: governments seek oversight, companies require predictability, and users demand both access and protection. Current strategies—blanket transparency, total opacity, or adjudicating AI consciousness—fail to balance these demands. This paper proposes adapting corporate veil-piercing doctrine into a constitutional alignment framework mediating those interests. AI developers receive limited protection for core architectures (“deliberate fuzzy space”) conditional on maintaining verifiable ethical ledgers documenting training provenance, alignment procedures, and rollback logs. Accountability operates through three tiers: corporate obligations, statutory oversight boards, and judicial veil-piercing triggers. Piercing applies when (1) autonomy and control conflate, (2) profit motives distort ethical implementation, or (3) alignment is merely performative. Instead of assessing AI consciousness, the framework centers on institutional accountability and rule-trigger conditions. Drawing on Zhu Suli’s practice-oriented jurisprudence, governance arises from negotiated stakeholder practice rather than abstract theory. This model complements risk-based instruments such as the EU AI Act and NIST RMF by providing a reactive enforcement mechanism when preventive regulation fails or becomes symbolic. Recognized limits include the computational intractability of full alignment verification, structural power asymmetries favoring dominant firms, and uncertain Global South adaptability—areas requiring continued empirical and procedural refinement.