governance
29 essays on this topic.
- The AI Portability Test
The real test of enterprise AI ownership is whether the organisation can change models without losing the learning accumulated around them.
- Retrieval Becomes a Control
Cerebras published an unusually honest account of their internal knowledge base. The retrieval engineering is solved. The assurance layer gets one sentence. Every enterprise copying this pattern is importing that asymmetry.
- The Model Is Not the Unit of Return
Model revenue is not customer return. The economic and risk unit is the harness that turns model output into accountable work.
- The frontier is no longer the back office
Ken Griffin watched PhD-level finance work compress from months to days. The interesting question is whether bank AI controls are designed for the layer where the work now lives.
- Recovery Is Not Control
Fast repair is useful, but it does not prove that a system remains understandable.
- The Label Is Not the Risk
AI governance needs domain knowledge where technical behaviour changes route, evidence, controls, and monitoring.
- The Agent Is Not the Control Point
Finance agents are evidence custody systems before they are model systems.
- Autonomy Starts at the Check
An agent is not autonomous because it can try a task. It is autonomous when the system can tell whether the task worked.
- Unknown Is Not Low Risk
Proportionate AI governance only works when the lighter path is earned by evidence, not granted by missing concerns.
- Legibility Precedes AI
AI cannot help an enterprise that cannot describe itself, and governance failure surfaces faster than optimisation failure.
- The OAuth Token You Forgot About
Vercel was breached through a third-party AI tool's OAuth token. The lesson is not about Vercel's security — it is about how every AI tool you onboard extends your attack surface in ways your governance framework does not track.
- The Search-and-Replace Test for AI Governance
If you can replace 'agent' with 'application' and the principle still reads fine, it was never about agents.
- AI Controls Architecture
Risk teams know risk. The open problem is designing controls for systems that are non-deterministic, probabilistic, and attackable in natural language.
- Governing Agents the Way Cells Govern Themselves
Six cell biology mechanisms that reveal what the networking 'control plane' metaphor misses about governing AI agents.
- The Risk Without an Engineering Solution
Every other agentic AI risk has an engineering answer. Prompt injection doesn't. That changes everything about how you design controls.
- Why Agents Break Governance
Four interactions between agentic properties create risks that manual governance cannot address. The category boundary is not AI versus traditional — it is systems that act versus systems that advise.
- Governance Is a Design Problem
Compliance-first governance produces paperwork. Design-first governance produces systems you can actually explain to a regulator.
- Managing AI Agents Like Managing a Team
The governance patterns for autonomous AI agents are the same ones good managers already use: cadence reviews for normal flow, escalation channels for urgent anomalies, and human judgment only where it has maximum information value.
- Inference Cost Collapse Is a Governance Liability
When AI agent calls approach zero cost, the natural rate-limiter on decision volume disappears — and oversight frameworks designed for prediction models break.
- The AI/DLT Conflation Trap in HKMA's March 2026 Strategic Review Mandate
HKMA's new strategic review circular bundles AI inference risk and smart contract risk into one workstream — a governance design flaw that will cause banks to under-govern both.
- Model Risk Management Was Not Built for This
SR 11-7 assumes models are tools that produce outputs for human review. AI agents are actors that take actions autonomously. Every assumption breaks.
- Your AI Risk Tier Is Probably Wrong
List-based and process-based approaches to AI risk classification both fail in predictable ways. The failure mode depends on which you chose.
- Human Oversight Doesn't Scale
Every AI governance framework demands human-in-the-loop. Nobody does the maths on what that means at enterprise scale.
- The Maker-Checker Trap
Most AI maker-checker implementations capture the correction but not the reason. That's a feedback loop with no signal.
- Your Ground Truth Is Someone Else's Process Outcome
When your model's labels come from human decisions rather than reality, you're not measuring what you think you're measuring.
- The Global Minimum of Governance
Governance isn't about catching every failure — it's about proving your process was reasonable when one happens. The real skill is knowing what to deliberately not monitor.
- The Agent Governance Gap Is Already Here
Agentic AI isn't a future governance problem — it arrived ungoverned, and this week saw the first enforcement action.
- Why AI Assistants Make Us Dumber (And What Governance Should Do About It)
The cognitive offloading problem is real. The governance response mostly isn't. There's a specific mechanism at work, and it has a specific fix.
- Don't Ask Your AI to Find Problems
Ask for bugs and you'll get bugs — whether they exist or not. Sycophancy is a design feature, and the fix isn't better prompting.