AI Governance Should Prioritize Control and Knowledge Boundaries Over Limiting Intelligence

arXiv:2611.12941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of autonomously acting AI agents makes the governance of agentic systems urgent. We propose the competence circuit, summarized as IKC + KC + C, that decomposes an agent's real-world impact into three pathways: intelligence-mediated discovery, procedural know-how, and direct control. Using the canonical fast-takeoff debate as a stress test, we formalize the conditions for intelligence-mediated fast takeoff as a conjunction jointly sufficient for fast catastrophic supremacy, showing that most rely on rapid knowledge acquisition or control attainment rather than intelligence alone.