AI an Cyborg should be late-join enabled.

[SimianC]

I feel like the best way to handle that would be if the AI is dead but with suicide laws in place, A late join taking over the AI role should be considered as the AI doing a hard reset

A new player takes the role, laws are set back to default, a big announcement is made of the fact, and we continue like normal

The hard reset could work automatically, or maybe need an ingame event to happen before it becomes available again. Either way, I think it's perfectly accomplishable while still keeping the gameplay balanced

But how would you recognize a suicide law? Just by looking for keywords or them all being dead? 
Looking for keywords would be too unreliable. What if all silicons are dead, but someone is being borged. Would the laws stay or be reset?

I personally dont like the idea of them being able to latejoin with already changed laws being in place.
So my idea would be a timer before laws could be changed, during which people are still allowed to late join. Something around 10 or 15 minutes.
A downside to this would be that you also couldnt upload a good law that would help the crew, like "Wizards arent human" and the likes.

Unlike Captain and other roles, I don't think AI should become a late-join option once the position becomes "vacant"; It's availability should be limited to rounds where there is no roundstart AI or when a Roboticist constructs an AI Core with the late-join chip. Some antagonists will go out of their way to eliminate the AI to prevent them from getting in their way, for the AI to come back suddenly because someone late-joined would feel pretty bad. It would also eliminate the possibility for the shutdown AI to be reset. 

On the topic of late-join silicons and law subversion, I think these concerns are also overstated as late-join borgs and borged crewmembers are fundamentally the same. If the crew is aware that the AI is subverted, the Roboticist can dissemble the late-join borg shells just as they would abstain from borging crewmembers until the AI is reset. If the crew isn't aware the AI is subverted, the Roboticist will most likely continue borging crewmembers or creating late-join shells; the result is the same: a player (re)enters the game as a rogue cyborg. 

I do realize this could be considered a buff to the traitor Roboticist. Creating late-join shells and stowing them away after subverting the AI, waiting for their robotic army to activate. I think this would be damn cool though.