Who is liable when the damage is caused by a decision made in milliseconds by a system whose causal chain runs through the designer, the operator, the certifier, the model trainer, and the regulatory framework that authorized it?

On January 24, 1978, the Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 scattered radioactive debris across 124,000 square kilometers of Canadian territory. It was pure hardware: no algorithms, no decisional autonomy, no causal complexity. The responsible party was identifiable; the applicable treaty existed. Canada still received half of what it claimed, with no acknowledgment of liability, three years later. If that case took three years to produce a partial settlement, what happens when the damage stems from an algorithm no one explicitly programmed to do what it did?

Chapter 9 of CLA builds the liability architecture of the Algorithmic Common Law: five layers differentiated by sphere of control — the system, the operator, the designer, the certifier, the regulatory framework — each with its own regime, identified subject, and precise activation mechanism. The weighting is asymmetric: violating a Threshold of Inviolability eliminates all liability caps, because some lines cannot have a price without ceasing to be lines. The chapter integrates the VEC fault taxonomy, the Sovereignty of Evidence, and the Algorithmic Dignity thresholds into a tiered fund system that guarantees compensation to victims before fault is determined — shifting the burden that ordinary law places on those least able to bear it.

The regime is not designed to compensate damage. It is designed to prevent it. Every presumption, every forensic audit, every risk-weighted premium exists so that operators build systems that never trigger the funds. Liability, distilled into six canonical axioms, will have served its purpose not when its mechanisms are activated, but when the architecture of consequences becomes an architecture of care.

🔹 CLA — Algorithmic Law for the Cosmos

Jesús Bernal Allende | Escuela del Deber-Optimizar y la Soberanía de la Evidencia

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