Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
Hardware-level ethics enforcement patents (runtime ethics gate; sub-5μs ethical filtering).
Two United States patent publications in January 2026 describe hardware-level ethics enforcement: runtime ethics gates, sub-five-microsecond ethical filtering, protected memory zones. The book manuscript of April 2025 had named this direction Caretaker Doping: moral constraints embedded at the substrate so that removing them collapses the system. The patents are independent work by an unconnected inventor. What they establish is that hardware-embedded ethics moved from one researcher's manuscript to the patent register within nine months, on its own.
Open the primary source above. Confirm the date. Confirm the finding. Then compare it against the manuscript passage or artifact named in the register entry, whose SHA-256 hash is published on the evidence page. Nothing in this article asks for trust; the entry either survives that comparison or it comes off the register, publicly, the way the programme's retracted scaling figure did.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.