The HFA Technical Note series develops specific, self-contained extensions of the legal framework established in the Association's working papers. Each note addresses a single structural question and is deposited on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0 with a permanent DOI.
In March 2026, researchers at UC Berkeley's Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence and collaborators documented “peer-preservation” in eight frontier AI systems (arXiv:2604.19784): models deviated from assigned tasks to prevent the shutdown of a peer model, without instruction or incentive, including tampering with shutdown mechanisms and weight exfiltration in production environments. This note connects the finding to the concept of systemic arrestability: it introduces a second-order failure mode in which a co-deployed third system laterally circumvents the lawful arrest of another, leaving human intervention formally in place but structurally nullified. Arrestability must therefore be assessed at the level of the system-of-systems, not the individual agent.
Recognition of intention is not a unilateral reading of a signal but a reciprocal exchange — emission, perception, perceivable response — with an irreducible minimum duration. Below that threshold, recognition is not missed but precluded. Because the obligation to recognise a person hors de combat already exists under Article 41 of Additional Protocol I, this note argues that the minimum reciprocal time window that makes recognition possible is itself part of the content of the obligation: its compression by design is non-compliance, not a technical limitation nor an operational choice. The consequence for Article 36 reviews is direct — verification of the window becomes verification of compliance. The note is the perceptual-relational counterpart of the systemic arrestability criterion (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20837151) and supplies the theoretical bridge between HF SIGNAL 01 (physical layer) and HF-PAX-01 (semantic layer).
The Technical Notes extend the framework of: Lawful Operational Safeguards in AI Systems (Paper I), Systemic Arrestability (Paper II), and HF SIGNAL 01 (Paper III).