Post-Deployment Accountability in AI Governance: A Cross-Regulatory Empirical Analysis of AI Incidents

AI systems may produce failures after deployment that pre-deployment safety assessments do not anticipate. Managing these failures requires what we refer to as adequate \textit{AI incident governance}, where having good definitions, taxonomies, monitoring practices, reporting mechanisms, and incident analysis is essential. We examine existing frameworks related to AI incident governance by regulatory bodies and independent efforts, and find that while there are frameworks that describe how individual functions can be performed, there is a lack of consistency within the aspects of definitions, classification, monitoring, and reporting. These inconsistencies apply to the types of incident data that is collected and reported, the ways in which they are categorised, and as a result, the depth, representativeness, and accuracy of analysis that can be performed.

AI accountability at scale is an institutional problem: who can observe, verify, and change deployed systems. We develop a sequential political-economy model in which an AI vendor chooses auditability and substantive mitigation, a deployer monitors after adoption while facing switching costs, and enforcement depends on verifiable evidence. Anticipating the deployer's monitoring response, the vendor may stop at an observable procurement floor while mitigating below the social first best, producing a proxy-compliance equilibrium. We characterize the unique interior equilibrium and the corner in which harm is fully mitigated. Independent audit rights raise enforcement exposure directly; portability restores deployer leverage; incident reporting adds a regulator-visible evidence channel; and outcome-linked liability creates incentives that do not depend on vendor-controlled detection. The results explain why documentation and standardized evaluations can coexist with persistent post-deployment harms, and generate testable implications for monitoring, mitigation, and the gap between formal compliance and operational outcomes.

The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) imposes technical obligations on high-risk AI providers, yet Articles 8-15 were drafted for predictive AI and leave seven technical gaps when applied to generative systems, spanning non-deterministic data governance, training-data provenance, continuous conformity, human oversight, open-ended robustness, emergent risk, and generative fairness. We deliver Governance-as-Code (GaC), a framework of 43 machine-checkable acceptance criteria across six compliance modules that run in a CI/CD pipeline and emit Article-indexed audit evidence, and we show the actual Rego policy code rather than merely describing it. Our central commitment is that the Act's open-textured standards ("appropriate levels," "possible biases") become declared, auditable numbers: robustness thresholds are derived from the provider's documented baseline and a state-of-the-art floor, and framing bias is collapsed into eight measurable proxies tested by counterfactual demographic probing. We also correct who owes what, since under Article 25 and Chapter V a downstream deployer relies on the upstream provider's Article 53 training-data summary and documents only the layers it controls, so GaC verifies that summary rather than demanding per-sample documentation the deployer never had. We validate on two enterprise deployments, a high-risk advisory chatbot and a limited-risk content generator, benchmarking against a manual expert audit rather than documentation artifacts that were never designed to enforce compliance. GaC reproduces all of the manual audit's findings, including three penalty-triggering violations, while cutting audit labor by roughly 75%.