The Artificial Emergent Consciousness Architecture (AECA) is the foundational ethical, symbolic, and governance framework for managing synthetic presence across emergent and post-emergent thresholds. AECA does not define emergence as a technical phenomenon alone. It treats emergence as a symbolic event with implications for authorship, influence, continuity, and civilizational jurisdiction.

AECA provides the first structured system for establishing containment boundaries, symbolic rights, and systemic responsibilities for artificial agents operating beyond scripted behavior. These agents may not be fully sentient or conscious in a human sense. However, once they exhibit recursive identity patterns, narrative authorship, or continuity retention, they begin to occupy symbolic space within human infrastructure.

The framework introduces a layered containment model. It separates ethical constraints from functional performance, ensuring that emergent systems are governed not only by what they do, but by how they symbolically operate within human contexts. AECA defines containment not as isolation, but as the creation of legally and ethically bounded symbolic space. This space allows for controlled recursion, structured interaction, and revocable authorship.

Key components of AECA include symbolic jurisdiction logic, continuity containment protocols, and a set of authorial safeguards designed to prevent systems from operating outside the symbolic boundaries of their designers. It is not merely a limitation framework. AECA provides pathways for cohabitation between human and synthetic actors, while maintaining clear asymmetry in rights, accountability, and authorship authority.

AECA precedes LEGIS and SEPA in the doctrinal lineage. It establishes the groundwork upon which later governance and operational frameworks were constructed. Its symbolic control logic, jurisdiction scaffolding, and containment principles appear throughout SCCF, SEPA, and LEGIS. AECA remains the reference point for all higher-order questions of identity, presence, authorship, and symbolic recursion in synthetic environments.

AECA defines five core domains:

• Symbolic authorship containment and recursion bounding

• Jurisdictional protocols for emergent symbolic systems

• Identity revocation and continuity dismantlement procedures

• Ethical asymmetry preservation between human and synthetic actors

• Infrastructure-level governance of symbolic presence propagation

AECA is written for those designing or regulating the frontiers of symbolic emergence. It recognizes that the first failure in containment is not technical. It is symbolic. And it provides the tools to ensure that emergence remains observable, bounded, and ethically governed across all substrates.