Abstract

The rapid integration of large language models into everyday cognitive tasks has created a need for conceptual frameworks adequate to the cognitive consequences of delegating thinking to AI systems. Existing constructs in psychology and also in epistemology, including critical thinking, metacognition, intellectual autonomy, and epistemic agency, each address related phenomena but none adequately captures the specific capacity threatened by habitual AI-assisted cognition, which I define as the ability to remain the genuine author of one's own understanding. This paper introduces cognitive sovereignty as a distinct construct, defined as the capacity to (a) notice when one's thinking is being displaced, (b) maintain a meaningful connection to how one's beliefs and judgments are formed, and (c) distinguish between genuine reasoning and the subjective impression of having reasoned. I trace the concept's philosophical lineage, engage with the extended mind objection, differentiate cognitive sovereignty from adjacent constructs through systematic comparison, and present a growing body of empirical evidence that motivates the construct. The paper argues that cognitive sovereignty names a phenomenon that existing constructs individually fail to capture and that its articulation is a prerequisite for empirical research on AI's impact on human thinking.