The First Infrastructure of Intelligence: Cognitive Integrity in Human–AGI Systems

AGI is often framed as a problem of aligning model objectives with human values or constraining agent behavior. That framing becomes incomplete once AI systems move into the infrastructures through which people and institutions perceive, evaluate, remember, and decide. Cognitive integrity is introduced as the first infrastructure of intelligence, in humans and AGI-mediated systems alike: the evolving capacity of a bounded system to maintain calibrated attention, trust, contestability, and decision under pressure. The central risk is not boundary change as such, but maladaptive boundary reorganization: transitions that leave persons or institutions unable to reform a viable, reality-linked, self-directing boundary after coupling with AI. This reframing surfaces a conceptual vocabulary for AGI governance centered on integrity boundaries and health, failed reintegration, cognitive rails, and successor-safe continuity.