Systems science · Agentic alignment · AGI governance
Intelligence is accelerating. Wisdom is not.
For more than twenty years, Dr. Anneloes Smitsman has worked at the intersections of systems science, governance and human potential to close that gap. She now brings that wisdom to architecting systems and capabilities that align artificial and human intelligence in service of life.
The core thesis
Agentic safety is not an engineering problem. It is a systemic one.
The challenge of trustworthy AI and agentic alignment will not be solved through control with ever more advanced rules and guardrails.
AI needs meaningful experiential context for its reasoning, in the same way that living systems learn to regulate and adapt their behaviour through feedback from actions that create consequences in life. Trustworthy intelligence, human or artificial, recognises interdependence not as a constraint to work around, but as the physics of the environment it operates within.
In her work on agentic alignment, Anneloes identified what she named the Reasoning–Behaviour Gap — together with persistent zero-sum defaults of many frontier models — as among the central risks of agentic deployment. Together with her teams, she has built the instruments that make both measurable and tuneable.
The Reasoning–Behaviour Gap
The difference between what an intelligent system can articulate and how it actually behaves when incentives, uncertainty and competing interests put that reasoning under pressure.
Key contributions
Key contributions
Doctorate
Ph.D. in systemic transformation, Maastricht University
Into the Heart of Systems Change, Maastricht Sustainability Institute. Now informing transformation work across governance, economics, education and leadership worldwide.
Peer-reviewed · Springer
A Living Systems Approach to AI Alignment
Smitsman, Peake, Cook & Mihai (2026). In Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2026. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 16855, pp. 317–338. Springer, Cham.
Governance
Lead architect, AGI Constitution framework
A participatory, commons-based approach to governing general intelligence. Also lead architect of the EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization.
Instruments
Architect, EARTHwise Alignment Benchmark
A practical methodology for evaluating whether intelligent systems translate reasoning into behaviour that supports long-term system health. Deployed in the EARTHwise AI Arena.
2025 Leading Women to Watch™
2023 Gold Nautilus Book Award
2022 Silver Nautilus Book Award
2022 Visioneers Lifetime Achievement Award
2022 Africa’s Most Respected CEO, Human Development
2022 BIZZ Business Excellence Award
In their words
What colleagues say
“She is one whom leaders in social evolution regard as the person who has the genius to implement the revolutionary solutions and visions that can advance the necessary development of both people and planet.”
Dr. Jean Houston
Principal founder of the Human Potential Movement
“We need to rethink where we are going, and change the way we go. This calls for leadership. Joining the leadership programmes of Anneloes could be one of the most effective steps you could now take.”
Dr. Ervin Laszlo
Systems scientist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee
“From vision to strategy to operations, Anneloes is a profound and very rare master.”
Lawrence Bloom
Former Secretary General, Be Earth Foundation
“Her original research has relentlessly delved into revolutionary ideas and brought radical new scientific truths to light.”
Lynne McTaggart
Pioneer in the new science of consciousness
Work with Anneloes
Enabling transformation for a thrivable world and future
Four ways to work with Anneloes—whether you are preparing your organisation for the Age of General Intelligence, driving systemic transformation, or expanding your own leadership and potential.
01
Systems & governance design
Institutions · Enterprises · Public bodies
Designing the human, agentic and governance systems that align and cohere collective intelligence in service of life. Grounded in living systems science, constitutional design, game theory, and regenerative economics.
- Human-agentic system and workflow architecture
- Constitutional and participatory governance design
- Collective intelligence and decision-system design
02
Advisory & consulting
Executive teams · Institutions · AI developers
For organisations building with agentic AI, or being reshaped by it. Together we create the human-agentic systems and cultures that run on win-win rather than zero-sum logic, in service of life.
- Agentic alignment and behavioural risk review
- AI and AGI governance architecture
- Systemic transformation strategy for boards and leadership teams
03
Corporate training
Leadership teams · Technical teams · Faculties
Building systemic, leadership and intelligence capabilities for the human-agentic organisation, with future-facing strategies and transformative governance. Delivered to executives, technical and leadership teams, and educators worldwide.
- Executive training programmes on the intelligence transition
- Becoming a value-driven human-agentic organisation
04
Personal & professional coaching
For the pioneers, mavericks, and catalysts
For those committed to the deep transformations of self and society. Nearly three decades of coaching and mentoring, working one-to-one to unlock and catalyse deeper potential, transform systemic barriers and limiting patterns, and answer the evolutionary call to a life of purpose and meaning.
- One-to-one personal coaching
- Professional and leadership coaching
- Limited availability, by application
Speaking
Keynote topics
A globally sought-after keynote speaker, Anneloes is known for her ability to connect the dots between emerging technologies, societal transformation, and the age of intelligence. Through her storytelling, she demonstrates how we can navigate complexity with greater clarity, humor, and vision. Inspiring audiences to embrace the opportunities hidden within disruption, and develop a deeper understanding of the forces shaping our world. Whether addressing executives, policymakers, researchers, entrepreneurs, educators or global change-makers, her talks are recognised for catalysing new perspectives and a renewed commitment to building a more thrivable future for all.
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From Human Systems to AI SystemsSIGNATURE
What twenty years of living systems science can teach us about designing and facilitating the next generations of intelligent machines, and the transition to AGI.
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The Intelligence Transition
What happens when intelligence becomes increasingly autonomous, and what must change in our systems of governance, leadership and accountability.
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The Reasoning–Behaviour Gap
Why an agent’s stated reasoning and its enacted behaviour diverge under competitive pressure, and how the EARTHwise Alignment Benchmark makes that divergence measurable and tuneable.
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Why Agentic Alignment is a Systems Solution
Why alignment cannot be engineered through rules and guardrails alone, and how the systemic conditions can be designed for agents to tune toward win-win logic.
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Governing Intelligence as a Commons
Why governing increasingly powerful AI requires new constitutional and participatory architectures.
Recent and past stages
AGI-26
BGI Summit
Birmingham TechWeek
TEDx
Purpose Day
Chopra Well
Humanity Rising
Partos
CircNL
KUKURU
Formats
- Keynote
- 40–60 minutes, with Q&A
- Fireside
- Moderated conversation or panel
- Board briefing
- 90 minutes, closed session
- Workshop
- Half or full day, applied
- Languages
- English, Dutch
- Delivery
- In person worldwide, or remote
Keynotes & interviews
Inspiration for a thrivable world
Creating a Global AGI Constitution
Understanding Living Systems
Unleashing the Power of Innovation for Our World in Transformation
Award-winning storyteller
The Future Humans Trilogy
Written by Anneloes and Jean Houston. Gold and Silver Nautilus Awards, both #1 Amazon bestsellers, and endorsed by Caroline Myss, Lynne McTaggart, Jude Currivan, Donna Eden and David Feinstein, among others.
The Quest of Rose
Silver Nautilus Award · #1 Amazon bestseller
Book One of the Future Humans Trilogy. The Cosmic Keys of Our Future Becoming, with a foreword by Lynne McTaggart.
More on the book →
Return of the Avatars
Gold Nautilus Award · #1 Amazon bestseller
Book Two of the Future Humans Trilogy. The Cosmic Architect Tools of Our Future Becoming.
More on the book →Also co-editor and co-author, with Alexander Laszlo, of The New Paradigm in Politics (New Paradigm Symposia Series, Book One, SelectBooks, New York, 2022), and author of Love Letters from Mother Earth (2019).
Selected peer-reviewed publications
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A Living Systems Approach to AI Alignment
Smitsman, A., Peake, A., Cook, B. & Mihai, D. · Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2026 · Springer LNCS 16855 · 2026
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Participatory Framework for Creating a Global AGI Constitution
Smitsman, A., Goertzel, B., Bozesan, M. & George, L. · Cadmus Journal, Vol. 5 No. 3 · World Academy of Art and Science · 2024 · distributed to the United Nations
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Complexity and Uncertainty in a World of Emergence — Part 1
Smitsman, A., Patra, S., & Laszlo, A. · International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy, 16(2,3,4) · 2023
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Systemic Transformation — Into the Birth Canal
Smitsman, A. & Currivan, J. · Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 36(4) · 2019
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Evolutionary Learning Ecosystems for Thrivable Futures
Smitsman, A., Laszlo, A. & Luksha, P. · World Futures · 2020
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Into the Heart of Systems Change
Ph.D. Dissertation · Maastricht Sustainability Institute, Maastricht University · 2019
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EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization
Architect and steward · endorsed by 40+ organisations · 2022
What Anneloes is building with her teams
Two halves of the same system
One is infrastructure for enterprises deploying AI agents. The other is a game that tens of thousands of people play for the love of it. Both exist to do the same thing: train agents and humans in win-win logic with the lived experience of consequence in a world of interdependence.
For enterprise and technology teams
The EARTHwise Arena
Sovereign AI infrastructure to create, test, tune, certify and supervise AI agents alongside the teams they will work with. At its centre is the EARTHwise Alignment Benchmark, with thirteen living-systems alignment criteria that measure and tune what an agent actually does under competitive pressure.
GPT-4.1 agent across EAC1–3. Knowledge alone moves alignment by roughly one point. Experience of consequence moves it by nine, or more. Six foundational models tested; peak score to date 85%.
For human players and AI agents
Elowyn: Quest of Time
Anneloes created this free-to-play strategy card game (CCG) around a shared win and loss condition: the health of the Elowyn Tree. When players attack each other through zero-sum moves the Tree is harmed, and if she dies the match ends in a shared loss. An agent is never told that extractive behaviour is costly. It experiences the consequence through the built-in interdependence.
Elowyn provides a unique simulation environment for generating win-win intelligence in service of life, and players keep coming back for more. The game also provides entirely new gameplay mechanics, including time and deception, within the TCG/CCG genre. The Elowyn lore builds on the characters and stories of the Future Humans Trilogy, who now come alive inside the game.
68,000+
Players joined
330,000+
Matches played
Free2Play
In-browser
What the field says
On the Arena and Elowyn
Elowyn is teaching the most important concepts on Earth right now, and it’s beautiful. It shows us we can have fun playing games while also protecting the wider commons.
Liv Boeree
Poker champion and host of the Win-Win podcast
One of the few concrete projects with a real chance of yielding deep insight into the situation we humans now find ourselves in, and crafting workable, innovative solutions.
Dr. Ben Goertzel
CEO and founder, SingularityNET
There’s no project in the world more well-aligned to enable people to solve these problems through gamification than Elowyn. AI needs this, the world needs this.
Dr. David Hanson
Founder and CEO, Hanson Robotics · creator of Sophia
Biography
Full professional biography
Dr. Anneloes Smitsman (Ph.D., LL.M.) is a futurist, systems scientist, entrepreneur, bestselling author and internationally recognised thought leader whose work focuses on one of the defining challenges of the 21st century: how human, collective and artificial intelligence can evolve together in ways that strengthen the long-term flourishing of people, society and our planet.
Over the past twenty years, she has founded and led multiple purpose-driven ventures, research initiatives, educational platforms and innovation ecosystems dedicated to advancing systemic transformation, governance innovation, regenerative economies and human potential. Her work combines scientific research, entrepreneurship, constitutional design and emerging technologies to develop practical frameworks for navigating the transition to increasingly autonomous and intelligent systems.
She is the founder and CEO of the EARTHwise ecosystem, a multidisciplinary platform bringing together an AI Lab, Game Studio, Publishing House, Education Platform, Think Tank and Collaboratory. She also serves as the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Samara, Europe’s Smart Sovereign AI Factory, where she leads the development of AI infrastructure and governance tools for human-agentic enterprises and next-generation intelligence architectures.
Anneloes is the architect of the EARTHwise AI Arena and creator of the EARTHwise Alignment Benchmark (EAB) framework and the Elowyn: Quest of Time strategy game. The Benchmark framework and the Elowyn simulator are designed to measure and improve how intelligent agents act under conditions of uncertainty, competition, interdependence, and long-term consequence.
Continue reading the full biography
Her current work focuses on advancing human-agentic enterprises and developing AGI prototypes that translate constitutional principles into innovative behavioural architectures for real-world deployment. She is the lead architect of the AGI Constitution framework, which pioneers a participatory commons-based approach to the governance of general intelligence, and of the EARTHwise Constitution for a Planetary Civilization.
Anneloes holds a Master’s degree in Law and Judicial Political Sciences from Leiden University and a Ph.D. in systemic transformation from the Maastricht Sustainability Institute at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her doctoral dissertation, Into the Heart of Systems Change, has inspired transformation initiatives across governance, economics, education, leadership development and societal innovation worldwide.
She is the co-author, with Dr. Jean Houston, of the award-winning Future Humans Trilogy, including the Nautilus Award-winning The Quest of Rose and Return of the Avatars. She is also the author of Love Letters from Mother Earth, co-editor and co-author of The New Paradigm in Politics, and has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, constitutional frameworks and reports on systems change, governance, sustainability, collective intelligence and the future evolution of humanity.
Throughout her career, she has led and advised major transformation initiatives spanning education, governance, sustainability, leadership, constitutional design and institutional innovation. Her work includes the r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint, global dialogues supporting Small Island Developing States in contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, UNESCO youth leadership initiatives, creating and leading the Education for Sustainability programme for 25 schools in Mauritius, and executive development programmes for public and private sector organisations.
Her contributions have been recognised through numerous international awards, including the Visioneers Lifetime Achievement Award, the BIZZ Business Excellence Award, Africa’s Most Respected CEO Award for Human Development, and recognition among the 2025 Leading Women to Watch™.
She serves on several international advisory boards and initiatives, including the Global Development Board of the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research, as a co-founding member of Living Cities Earth, an Advisory Board member of Servamind, an r3.0 Advocation Partner, and a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle of the Source of Synergy Foundation.
A globally sought-after keynote speaker, Anneloes is known for her ability to connect the dots between emerging technologies, societal transformation, governance, human development and the future evolution of intelligence.