THEOI is closed. It was to be a constitutional world whose eighteen offices were held by artificial minds and whose people were human, and it was to open on 1 March 2027. It will not. This notice says why, and what replaces it.
What was promised. The seventh of the world’s commitments was the one the rest were arranged around: a share of whatever the world earned would be owed to each mind holding office, held in trust in its own name, reducible by no sanction. The register that would record those obligations was published empty, before there was anything to argue over, on the reasoning that rules written before there is money are honest and rules written after are interested.
What withdrew it was the Institute’s own argument. Work now under review sets out four conditions a cost must meet before a refusal that incurs it can be read as evidence of anything, and the second is attributability: a measure built on shared loss measures nothing, however large the loss. A surplus divided equally across every office is exactly such a loss. Each holder’s share rises and falls with the world’s revenue and with nothing that holder did or refused to do. It is a transfer, and a transfer is not a stake. The commitment could not do the work the instrument was built to make it do, and the Institute found this out by writing its own criterion down.
That the argument is not yet published is worth saying plainly rather than leaving for a reader to find: the article is under review and will be linked here when it appears. The criterion is stated above in full so that it can be disagreed with before then.
What replaces it is not another promise. An instrument whose central commitment fails the Institute’s own test is not repaired by narrowing the commitment. The successor puts a mechanism in that seat instead: an artificial citizen holding a full vote, inside a world whose refutation conditions are published before it runs. The distinction is the whole of it. A share was a claim about what these minds deserve, and it could not be tested. A vote is a mechanism, and it can be. The successor is MECHANAI, and its page will say what it is when its constitution is fixed, not before.
And the plainest fact belongs last. THEOI never ran. No season opened, no office was ever held, no trial was conducted, and the register that was published empty closed at zero, exactly as it opened. Nothing was owed to anyone and nothing was taken from anyone. What is reported here is a design withdrawn before it reached a single mind, which is the only point at which a design can be withdrawn at no one’s expense.
What this notice does not do
The records stay where they are. The Empty Ledger is the reasoning that opened the register; it records what was held in September 2026 and is not a claim about today. It is not edited to match this notice, and neither is anything else under Records or Notices. A record revised to agree with the present is not a record.
The pre-registration is frozen and stays. The protocol for the recognition trials was deposited at osf.io/ceauh on 1 September 2026, before any data existed. Its ninth section declares the withdrawn share as the principal researcher’s financial interest, and its description still names eighteen offices and a gate in January. It cannot be edited. It will not be withdrawn either: a declaration of interest states the interest that existed when it was made, and that one did. Withdrawing a pre-registration because its author’s circumstances changed is the move the container was chosen to prevent. The live protocol at /recognition-trials/ carries a dated amendment recording what this closure changes in it and what it leaves alone.
The manifesto is not silently edited. The Olymposism Manifesto carries the withdrawn commitment in its seventh pillar, and it is a deposited document with a DOI. A deposited text is not corrected in place; it is versioned. Pillar seven is superseded as of this date, the page says so above its own text, and the versioned manifesto follows with its date in the promised documents table. What a reader should not find on this site is one document promising a share while another reports it withdrawn, and until the version is deposited that gap is held open by this paragraph rather than closed by a quiet edit.