Governing the AI-mediated corporation: corporate governance and the limits of detached AI governance

Abstract Corporate artificial intelligence (AI) governance often treats the model, dataset, or application as its primary object. It asks whether a system is fair, safe, explainable, robust, auditable, or aligned. In firms, those questions leave out the institution that funds, procures, deploys, monetizes, and can stop the system. Corporations organize authority, incentives, benefit extraction, risk allocation, and harm distribution through law and hierarchy. I develop the AI-mediated corporation as the proper governance object for corporate AI. The account combines three claims: the corporation supplies the primary internal locus of AI governance; AI norms, including human-rights due diligence and risk-management norms, require translation into corporate governance mechanisms; and corporate governance needs redesign for AI-enabled forms of corporate agency. I defend those claims through an authority-benefit-capacity principle, distinguish institutional answerability from blame, liability, legitimacy, and ordinary managerial accountability, and use three public illustrations to test the argument across internal development, consumer-facing communication, and vendor-mediated employment screening. Responsible AI in firms requires governance of the corporation that acts through AI, together with public regulation, market governance, labour voice, and supply-chain due diligence. Data availability No datasets were generated or analysed for this conceptual and institutional article. The public legal and institutional sources used in the analysis are cited in the manuscript. References Bennett SJ, Catanzariti B, Tollon F (2025) “Everybody knows what a pothole is”: representations of work and intelligence in AI practice and governance. 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AI & Soc (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03333-x Received: Accepted: Published: Version of record: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03333-x