Conceptual / Theoretical Article

Relational accountability in AI governance: A Confucian framework

  • Jooya Wong UCSI University, Malaysia
  • Shumin Ren UCSI University, Malaysia

Abstract

Artificial intelligence increasingly operates through organisational and technical relationships that distribute control across model providers, platform providers, deploying institutions, professionals, users, and regulators. Existing accountability research clarifies answerability, audit, documentation, oversight, and institutional duties, while relational approaches in AI ethics show how roles and dependencies shape moral responsibility. A remaining problem concerns the translation of relational ethical concepts into a structured form of institutional accountability. This exploratory theory and model development study addresses that problem through the Confucian Relational Responsibility Framework (CRR). The paper first synthesises four patterns in relevant literature: the relational turn in AI and robot ethics, the translation of Confucian concepts into AI ethics, semantic compression during governance translation, and the continuing institutional accountability gap. It then uses a bounded conceptual corpus, explicit concept selection criteria, a four-step governance translation protocol, and framework construction to develop CRR. Five selected concepts are translated into responsibility categories: role into role responsibility, relationship into relational responsibility, ritual propriety into boundary-setting responsibility, trustworthiness into trust responsibility, and coordination into coordinated accountability. These categories are organised through five analytical dimensions: actors, relationships, scenarios, responsibilities, and mechanisms. A worked example involving generative AI search in a public knowledge institution illustrates how the framework traces duties across providers, institutions, professionals, and users and connects them to disclosure, human review, documentation, monitoring, audit, complaint procedures, and institutional review. CRR is presented as an exploratory analytical layer between relational ethics and institutional accountability. Empirical, legal, organisational, and cross-cultural evaluation remains necessary before broader claims of practical validity can be made.

Keywords

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