The AI Blame-Chain

The AI Blame-Chain is a political, ethical, and educational manifesto about where responsibility for artificial intelligence actually sits. It argues that public argument keeps blaming the person nearest the screen, the child with the chatbot, the worker with the employer's tool, the student flagged by a detector, while the decisions that produce harm sit higher up, in product design, training-data acquisition, scraping and licensing, corporate strategy, boards and investors, cloud providers, data-centre operators, chip makers, procurement, employers, utilities, planning authorities, regulators, governments, and school systems. The paper separates immediate responsibility from structural responsibility, traces each harm to the office that can stop it, and refuses to let complexity shelter power. Sections cover the conditions children already live in, the blame-chain method, institutional self-protection, the sorting history of mass schooling, critical AI literacy, assessment without surveillance, public education governance including the 2026 New York City moratorium, the student-drafted STUDENTS FIRST Act, and Hawaii SB 3001, the corporation as artificial person, data-centre energy and water demand with IEA figures, university labour disputes including the NTEU campaign at the University of Sydney, creative-work extraction, automated decision-making in welfare, policing, borders, and hiring, Indigenous data sovereignty and the CARE principles, supply-chain child labour, the visible and invisible child, and a closing set of binding demands