Scaling, Lock-In, and Proxy Compliance: A Political Economy of Responsible AI

Post-deployment accountability has become central to AI governance, yet little empirical evidence shows whether monitoring, incident reporting, and impact assessment obligations are visible when AI systems fail. This study analyzes real-world AI incidents from the AI Incident Database (2020--2026) and codes them against nine post-deployment provisions from the EU AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the GDPR. The findings show substantial accountability gaps: 77.1% of incidents lack evidence of EU AI Act post-market monitoring, and 99.6% lack documented Data-Protection Impact Assessment evidence. Governance gaps are also systemic, with 9.8% of incidents simultaneously non-compliant under two or more regimes. Incidents detected through internal monitoring show much higher compliance than externally detected incidents (87.5% vs 5.3% under the EU AI Act; 95.8% vs 58.1% under NIST), suggesting that monitoring capacity is a key condition for effective post-deployment governance. Building on these findings, the paper proposes the Proactive AI Governance Compliance Framework (PAGCF), a four-phase lifecycle for pre-deployment assessment, continuous monitoring, incident preparedness, and cross-framework verification.

AI deployment in sensitive domains such as health care, credit, employment, and criminal justice is often treated as unsafe to authorize until model internals can be explained. This often leads to an excessive reliance on mechanistic interpretability to address a deployment challenge beyond its intended scope. We argue that the gate should instead be calibrated verification: authorization should be domain-scoped, independently checkable, monitored after release, accountable, contestable, and revocable. The reason is twofold. First, model capability is uneven across nearby tasks, so authorization must attach to a specific use rather than to a model in general. Second, societies have long governed opaque expertise through credentials, monitoring, liability, appeal, and revocation rather than mechanism-level explanation. Recent evidence reinforces this distinction between mechanistic understanding and deployment authority: a 53-percentage-point gap between internal representations and output correction shows that understanding may not translate into action, while one scoping review found that only 9.0% of FDA-approved AI/ML device documents contained a prospective post-market surveillance study. We propose Verification Coverage, a six-component reportable standard with a minimum-composition rule, as the metric that should sit beside capability scores in model cards, leaderboards, and regulatory disclosures.

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%.