AI Accountability

Organizations make claims about their AI agents: a person approves every external email, every action is logged, an evaluation shows the agent is safe to deploy. Article 12 of the EU AI Act requires high-risk systems to allow the automatic recording of events but does not say which records settle a given claim. The position is one sentence: to be checked, a claim about an agent must first name its policy, its scope, the records that would settle it, and who writes them. Adapting the preconditions of an assurance engagement, we call a claim auditable when these elements and a decision rule are fixed before any verdict and the records are obtainable. This extends the Policy Checkability dimension of our Auditable Agents framework from single actions to claims. Agents add three conditions: coverage by an independent record, authorization bound to each action's arguments, and completeness beyond integrity. Under an explicit model, we prove that support is impossible without each wherever its hypotheses hold. A claim-check table applies the method to six common claims, anchored in current NIST, IETF, and OWASP drafts. A worked case follows one claim through five evidence states. We close with a practice box and steps for operators, buyers, auditors, and standard setters.

As code generation is increasingly delegated to AI systems, the bottleneck is shifting from writing code to supervising the systems that write it --- a shift CS-education researchers have begun to name. This shift exposes a vocabulary gap: the field asks for "human oversight" without a working distinction between the two things language does in a delegation channel --- coordinate action (cybernetic: words succeed when the world comes to match them) and coordinate understanding (epistemic: they succeed when they answer to the world and a hearer can check that they do). The failure this names is not cybernetic language but epistemic-form language doing cybernetic work: explanation-shaped output calibrated for approval rather than truth. Oversight that checks only whether an output was approved is satisfiable by rubber-stamping; oversight that holds an agent accountable requires the reasoning behind its work be retrievable and checkable. We present three delegation episodes --- illustrations, not controlled evidence --- in which epistemic engagement proved practicable while remaining auditable, one public record where a recommendation was withdrawn on its own stated terms, and one failure case illustrating oversight that requires no reasons for its discretionary choices. We propose a criterion for agentic-system governance, alongside existing technical trust properties: every consequential choice should carry the condition under which it would have gone otherwise, in a form a third party can test. Without such a condition, a third party cannot distinguish a decision from a rubber stamp. We give the criterion an operational form --- a two-part reconstruction test scoring a delegation record by whether a second reader can predict what the agent does under a perturbation --- and a deliberation-recording convention, ORRCF, that makes the condition a required component of every recorded choice.

The EU AI Act (Art. 27) requires deployers of high-risk AI systems to conduct Fundamental Rights Impact Assessments (FRIAs) before deployment, yet the evidence needed for credible assessments is fragmented across incompatible incident repositories, risk vocabularies, and legal texts. We present a reusable Semantic Web-based framework that consolidates this evidence for two high-risk public sector categories: employment and worker management (Annex III(4)) and access to essential public services (Annex III(5)(a)). A curated 150-record corpus is annotated along four axes using keyword, LLM, and hybrid methods and serialised as a SPARQL-queryable knowledge graph of 1,351 RDF triples. Five FRIA demonstration scenarios surface 103 records (68.7% coverage). Evaluation against a 69-record gold standard reveals that LLM-assisted classification of the employment domain achieves only $κ= 0.045$, a cautionary result for automated fairness-related evidence retrieval in this domain. All artefacts are released openly to support adoption by regulators, national authorities, and SMEs.

Major venues now publish detailed rules about how authors, reviewers, and area chairs may use AI, and those rules differ by role, by task, and by what must be disclosed. AI detection, the instrument usually proposed to enforce them, estimates something else: whether an AI model wrote the text. We argue that this target is misaligned with the decisions conferences and journals face, and propose policy-conditioned AI-use detection, an evidentiary framework for assessing whether a human--AI workflow complied with a stated rule. Policy makes the governing rule an explicit input. Inference reports hypotheses, evidence, calibration regime, and uncertainty in place of verdicts such as "AI detected". Evaluation builds benchmarks from reproducible pipelines that generate compliant and non-compliant workflows, and reports true positive rate at a false positive rate the venue fixes in advance. We work the framework through peer review, where at plausible violation rates a detector at a strong operating point still flags more compliant authors than violating ones. The framework therefore also names what a venue must instrument: structured disclosure, approved-tool routing that respects reviewer confidentiality, and a path by which a finding can be contested. Under this framing a detector is not an authorship classifier but an auditable procedure with an error rate the venue fixes in advance and can defend.

Communities often respond to potentially AI-assisted work by asking three questions: Was AI used? Was that use disclosed? Can hidden use be detected? These questions place AI use itself at the center of accountability while overlooking a deeper problem: unowned judgment. Evaluations, claims, decisions, and creative directions can be shaped by AI with no accountable human or institution prepared to stand behind them. We develop this argument through two illustrative cases: AI-assisted peer review and concealed AI use in creative work. The first shows how contribution dissolution can weaken responsibility while the second shows how the fear of losing credit can discourage honest disclosure. The cases expose the limits of disclosure rules and provenance records as responses to AI-mediated collaboration. We offer three directions for discussion: distinguishing the roles AI plays, identifying judgments that require clear human ownership, and creating conditions in which AI involvement can be disclosed without default penalty. The broader aim is to make AI-shaped contributions discussable, creditable, contestable, and repairable.

The vocabulary used to describe AI agents in governance contexts -- learning, memory, values, compliance, identity, trust -- is borrowed from psychological and organizational science, contributing to systematic failures in how organizations deploy, oversee, and hold agents accountable. This paper argues that the problem is not merely terminological but epistemological: psychological vocabulary carries an "invisible grammar" of its home discipline into governance discourse, calibrating frameworks to a metaphysical entity that does not exist in current AI architectures. We call this the disciplinary language transfer problem. Drawing on Wittgenstein's concept of language games, Kuhn's paradigm-laden observation, Haraway's situated knowledge, and Star and Griesemer's boundary object theory, we show that the transfer operates at three levels (epistemological assumptions, theoretical constructs, and surface vocabulary), each requiring a different remediation. We characterize six foundational epistemological assumptions embedded in Western psychological governance discourse, trace their origin in specific philosophical traditions, and show why each fails when applied to systems without developmental continuity. The paper's practical output is an actionable Disciplinary Audit: a six-question governance document scan operationalized through a translation taxonomy of thirty-seven terms mapping operational constructs to agent-appropriate replacements, presented here in abridged form and openly archived in full. The vocabulary reform proposed here is not merely terminological; it is the condition of possibility for governance frameworks that correctly identify what they are governing.

Deep learning systems now mediate military decisions to use force, yet their internal logic resists inspection, their evaluation practices are gameable, and their deployment fractures accountability across dispersed stakeholders. The ethical challenge posed by these systems is fundamentally epistemic: not just whether autonomous weapons should be permitted to kill, but whether the conditions for responsible human judgment can survive when critical functions are delegated to opaque algorithms. We show that this epistemic condition produces a concrete accountability gap: responsibility diffuses across designers, operators, and policymakers while International Humanitarian Law presupposes capacities for judgment that current AI systems lack. To address this gap, we propose a governance framework that proceduralizes ethical constraints through named accountability roles, adversarial auditing with undisclosed benchmarks, tiered deployment thresholds, and a proposed NATO evaluation standard. Counterfactual analysis of eight documented cases (1988-2025) shows that each governance mechanism addresses a documented class of failure, but no single safeguard suffices in isolation: effective governance of military AI requires not only technical constraints but the institutional infrastructure to keep human judgment meaningful.

AI-assisted claims can appear authoritative when evidence, analysis, human authorization, presentation, and correction history refer to different states. Provenance, attestation, and transparency expose history but alone do not specify the publication transition examined here. We develop Publication Authority as an exact-state, non-transferable, single-use publication capability and instantiate it in PAC-2026 (Publication-Accountability Calculus), a machine-readable AIJIM Protocol candidate. We evaluate its fourth bounded semantic freeze (SF-4), a fixed-profile specification designed for replaceable bindings. Six obligations govern evidence, runs and artifacts, measurement disclosure, authorization, surface correspondence, and lifecycle continuity. Each yields a target-bound witness, localized counterexample, or localized unverifiability; none can compensate for another. Only a fresh, complete all-pass record derives the permit consumed by one atomic publication transition. We use identity vectors, adversarial cases, finite models, and historical implementations. Ten models explored 110,764 safe reachable states; 76 unsafe configurations produced the expected violation or observer countermodel. A reader surface passing its correspondence check cannot authorize publication unless the accepted record admits that surface. SF-4 separates evidence horizon from verification time and rejects an authentic but causally invalid authorization. A historical predecessor path reproduced 17 frozen authorization-successor outcomes. A later in-house, instance-blind test of known case classes matched all 183 scored expectations; same-host package execution reproduced its 240 archived observations. Results support internal coherence, bounded safety, fault sensitivity, and limited constructibility, but not factual truth, general refinement, blind interoperability, field efficacy, or standards status.

Incidents show that AI safety failures often arise across multiple layers. We present a safety-by-design assurance architecture combining model-level supervision, such as Scientist AI, with system-level controls over scaffolds and harnesses, independent verification, monitoring, and evidence infrastructure, supported by governance for accountability and evidence interoperability.

As AI systems move from transient model invocations toward long-lived actors that persist across credentials, clients, sessions, and runtime instances, identity infrastructure must answer a basic question: where should the canonical continuity boundary be placed? This paper introduces Actor-native Identity and presents SoulAuth, an open-source Rust reference implementation for Humans and long-lived AIActors. We argue that any subject that must persist under its own identity and remain independently attributable should have an ActorIdentity that is not replaced by an Account, Credential, Client, AuthSession, IdentityBinding, or runtime instance. SoulAuth therefore treats Humans and long-lived AIActors as first-class identity subjects while keeping authentication distinct from downstream authority. Methodologically, we use a Philosophical Engineering approach that translates conceptual analysis of subjecthood into identity objects, invariants, lifecycle semantics, system responsibilities, implementation boundaries, and inspectable conformance evidence. Evaluation against the fixed SoulAuth v0.1.0 artifact shows that the implementation realizes core boundaries including Human/AIActor first-class identity status, Client/Actor separation, and Authentication/Authority separation, while gaps remain in unified Credential modeling and historical attribution anchored to ActorIdentity. We therefore report partial, not full, architecture conformance.

Claims that Artificial Intelligence systems improve decisions, broaden access, reduce harm, or empower users can exceed what their evaluation establishes. Predictive performance alone does not establish safety, the presence of oversight does not establish meaningful control, and faster task completion does not establish understanding or choice. Evaluation must account for unreliable outputs and uneven performance, but also for overreliance, weakened recourse, and displaced human expertise. The harder questions are what the evidence warrants, which relations of power remain unexamined, and where measurement must stop. Assessing improvement requires examining what institutions value and the conditions AI is asked to address. AI is both revelation and intervention. Its use can reveal unmet human needs and assumptions about what matters. Once deployed, it can repair, compound, substitute for, or conceal existing failures. We develop a rupture test that evaluates deployment against explicit human and non-AI baselines. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, we examine dignity and the common good alongside questions of who owns AI infrastructure and who controls its use. These commitments shape judgments about improvement; evidence alone cannot establish moral or political legitimacy. We distinguish evidence-bounded deployment, which limits claims to what has been evaluated, from measurement-bounded governance, which records constraints that favorable evidence cannot override. RISE AI provides an evidence architecture for making bounded claims about Responsibility, Inclusivity, Safety, and Empowerment. It records what is claimed, who answers for it, what evidence supports it, and what would require the claim to be qualified, revised, or withdrawn.

On August 2, 2026, the obligations of Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect, requiring generative AI providers to mark the content their systems produce and ensure it can be detected as AI-generated. Days later, Anthropic disclosed that every Claude model released after that date embeds a watermark based on SynthID-Text in all generated text, enabled by default with no user opt-out; Google has deployed SynthID-Text in Gemini since 2024. Users objected that the watermark degrades quality, particularly for code, that it secretly encodes identifying information, and, in mutual contradiction, that it is easily removable and inescapable; the vendor answered with assurances of unchanged quality, no identifying information, and robustness to light editing. In this work, we argue that neither the objections nor the assurances can currently be verified and that this unverifiability, rather than watermarking itself, is the substantive governance failure. We sort the contested assertions by what it would take to settle each and evaluate the open-source SynthID-Text implementation on two open-weight models, because no public tool can test the deployed systems. On prose, the measured effect of the watermark does not exceed that of changing the sampling seed. On code, the cost is three points of correctness on one model and below measurement on the other, while detection remains near chance, a limitation of detectability rather than quality. The remaining gaps trace to withheld access or missing institutions and we map each to a requirement: release of matched outputs, configuration disclosure, accredited audits, a shared evaluation protocol, and interoperable detection.

Sensor-based AI systems are rarely operated under the conditions under which they were trained: devices, personnel and recording epochs change, and each change degrades performance in ways a random train-test split cannot reveal. We propose a staged, accountable evaluation protocol that treats the evaluation of a deployed model as a measurement with declared reference levels and a quantified uncertainty. Four cumulative generalisation stages hold out devices, subjects and time. Each stage is judged on quantiles of repeated trainings against chance references with the correct class count, an out-of-present-scope rate exposes silent misdirection towards classes that are no longer present in deployment relative to training, and an explicit decision rule ties roll-out decisions not to means but to 5% quantiles. We demonstrate the protocol on infrastructure-free geomagnetic localisation with smartphone-based recurrent classifiers in two real underground mines, including a replication of the scheme's training stages at the second site. Unchanged models are re-evaluated on data recorded 34 months after the training campaign, on a device generation unknown at training time and with a held-out surveyor. The 5% quantile of their present-conditioned precision there is 0.39 over 299 repeated trainings, 16.5 times the chance level; across the composition of the 42 reachable location classes the figure varies by +/-0.08, several times the spread between repeated runs. Repeated trainings of a single configuration show why means mislead: a bimodal configuration passes a mean-based test decisively while its 5% quantile lies more than an order of magnitude below chance.

Frontier AI developers publish safety frameworks that commit them to evidencing whether their models are dangerous. The European Union and California now treat these documents as instruments of accountability, and both already impose duties on their revision. Neither requires the revision to be legible, in the sense that a reader could learn from the developer's own account what changed. We introduce the silent revision rate, the share of material changes to a framework's commitments that the developer's published account does not identify, and we release the versioned, hash-pinned corpus needed to compute it. The corpus contains every public version of the safety frameworks of the twelve developers that have published one, together with each provider's changelog, redline or announcement. We trace 710 commitment instances across twelve consecutive version pairs, code them against a frozen codebook, and adjudicate 244 individually. Three findings follow. First, 67% of material changes (95% CI 62 to 72) are silent under a strict standard and 53% under a lenient one, falling to 49% at section granularity. Second, silence appears to track the form of the account, since narrative announcements run at 74% against 63% for itemised changelogs, whereas account length in words barely matters; on the test that respects nesting the difference is suggestive. Third, 77% of traced changes weaken or remove a commitment, and in seven of eight pairs weakenings are more often silent than strengthenings. The statutory remedy therefore exists and specifies the wrong artefact. A justification explains why a framework changed, an enumeration states what changed, and only the latter makes revision auditable. We argue that publication duties should carry an enumeration duty, which one provider already meets, voluntarily and incompletely.

Multi-agent LLM pipelines increasingly span organisational boundaries; when a fault surfaces, someone must determine where it entered. The artifact available is rarely a full execution trace: it is the reports each agent filed, and a filed report can state a conclusion alongside its observations. Using a pre-registered, institutionally partitioned pipeline of six agents with process-level information boundaries, balanced defect injection and matched clean twins (345,600 requests per chain model, two models), we first report that our pre-registered hypothesis -- that collective responsibility framing degrades escalation with chain length -- is not supported. The layer nevertheless fails asymmetrically. It originates almost nothing: zero allegations across 7,996 clean episodes where every agent stayed silent. It filters upstream error poorly, naming an innocent party in 34.4% and 62.6% of clean episodes where an agent raised a false alarm. Conditional on no agent proposing the true origin (59.5% of episodes on one chain model), an auditor reading the reports recovers it in 4.1% of cases -- below a uniform guess (20%) and the best fixed-link accuser (31.0%) -- while reaching 60.3% from the raw documentation of the same episodes. Deleting one clause, the field carrying the agents' own conclusion, isolates the cause at constant observations: accuracy rises to 45.2% (+41.2 pp, 95% CI +35.3 to +46.9) and adherence collapses from 94.4% to 3.4%; where the suggestion was correct the same deletion instead costs accuracy, 70.5% to 55.7%. The harm replicates on two frontier auditors in four conditions out of four (+8.5 to +39.0 pp) and in a second domain (+47.7 and +61.1 pp), where the cost disappears. The net effect is governed by upstream reliability together with both conditional magnitudes. An accountability layer needs evidence sufficiently independent of the conclusions it verifies.

Accountability means a decision can be examined, justified, and contested. LLMs make this hard: fluent output may be ungrounded, incomplete, or unfaithful to the decision process. Achieving accountability requires verified rationales (how was the decision reached), assumptions (what was assumed rather than known), policy consistency (the same treatment for the same facts), and pivotal conditions (what would change the outcome). We introduce self-faithfulness as an automatic test of accountability: changing the pivotal conditions should change the decision. We examine accountable AI through clinical trial matching, a high-stakes task central to evidence-based medicine. Although LLM-based matchers match patients to trials reasonably accurately, they apply decision policies inconsistently and produce rationales that are unfaithful to their own decisions. We introduce VERDICT, an LLM-based agent that translates a decision task, its constraints, and its policy into Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), then derives the decision with SMT and MaxSMT solvers -- so policies are applied consistently and decisions are accountable by construction. Across a SIGIR 2016-derived dataset and TREC 2021, VERDICT achieves the strongest decision accuracy among LLM-only and neurosymbolic baselines, applies policies with perfect consistency, and produces clinician-preferred rationales grounded in explicit assumptions and pivotal conditions, with improved counterfactual self-faithfulness.

Enterprise artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in decisions that must remain lawful, explainable, adaptable, and accountable despite personnel turnover, model replacement, regulatory change, and shifting organizational incentives. Existing governance frameworks provide important principles but do not by themselves supply a compact mathematical language for evaluating whether an institution can preserve sound judgment over time. This paper develops a design-science framework for institutional legacy: the durable capacity of a decision system to continue producing beneficial, lawful, explainable, and adaptable outcomes after its original designers have stepped away. The framework contributes: (i) a normalized Legacy Score based on a penalized geometric mean of knowledge retention, governance, human oversight, adaptability, feedback learning, and jurisdictional fidelity; (ii) Decision Confidence and Decision Risk models separating evidentiary confidence from consequence; (iii) authority-aware retrieval and calibrated abstention; (iv) Decision Memory for governed organizational learning; (v) Regulatory Change Velocity mapping change exposure to review intervals; and (vi) a federated regulatory knowledge-graph architecture preserving provenance and legal hierarchy. The paper also proposes eight AI Decision Integrity Rules, an evaluation protocol, and a reproducible computational demonstration. The demonstration combines a deterministic stress test with 200 Monte Carlo replications of 10,000 synthetic decisions each, illustrating Legacy Score non-compensation and comparing consequence- and authority-aware routing with a matched-coverage confidence-only baseline. The contribution remains conceptual rather than field-validated; the simulation tests internal behavior, not production performance, and all parameters require context-specific calibration.

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are widely used in explainable artificial intelligence (AI) to show how a model's outputs would change if the input features were manipulated. This technique is used for a range of tasks such as debugging models, explaining predictions, justifying decisions, and providing algorithmic recourse. In this paper, we explore the normative legitimacy of employing counterfactuals in real-life model deployment settings. We discuss the different stakes involved in these different purposes for which CEs are commonly employed, and find stricter requirements for justification and recourse. In particular, we find that naive application of CEs for justification and recourse can lead to ignoring contestable choices made throughout the machine learning (ML) pipeline, thus obfuscating that decisions and counterfactuals for those decisions are also artifacts of an organization's materialized design and governance choices. We demonstrate this with four empirical experiments involving interventions at stages of the ML pipeline ``upstream" of the explanation itself, and show that these affect the generated counterfactuals. We find that an organization's choices on measurement models for feature and labels, business requirements, model validation, and the metric of model success have as much or more impact on the generated counterfactuals as the specifics of the generating method. Our findings underline the need to account for such choices upon providing justification and recourse, providing a stark reminder of the relational nature of these tasks. As putative justifications or recourse recommendations, CEs do not provide adequate answers to some important "why"-questions because they preclude consideration of whether the decision-maker ought to have acted differently.

The emerging Internet of Agents enables LLM-powered agents to discover peers, invoke tools, and delegate tasks across organizational boundaries. Existing protocols increasingly define how agents exchange messages, but not how an agent proves its identity, authorization, advertised capabilities, or accountability after delegation. We present InterSAGE, a trust-native protocol suite that supplies this missing security substrate alongside, rather than in place of, communication protocols. InterSAGE comprises four layers: Persistent Identity, Discovery, Trust Negotiation, and Accountability. Its four core primitives are: (1) Agent Identity Cards that bind developer, code package, operator, and deployment context; (2) capability-aware discovery using DID-bound Verifiable Credential manifests; (3) trust negotiation combining monotonic capability attenuation with two-tier access control; and (4) kernel-mediated cryptographic audit trails that bind usage, delegation, and execution traces to agent identity without a consensus ledger. InterSAGE is designed to complement MCP, A2A, ANP, and AG-UI, allowing communication protocols to evolve independently while keeping trust semantics explicit, portable, and verifiable. We compare InterSAGE with more than 50 efforts spanning agent protocols, decentralized identity, OAuth/OIDC extensions, zero-trust governance, delegation, and audit architectures. We show that no prior architecture jointly enforces persistent identity, capability-aware discovery, trust negotiation, and accountability as a unified four-layer trust substrate for secure agent interoperability.

As AI systems proliferate in consumer facing applications, questions about liability for AI related harms remain unresolved. This working paper examines whether India's Consumer Protection Act, 2019, adequately addresses harm caused by defective AI products and services, and whether it proportionately allocates liability across the AI value chain. The Act's broad definitions of product liability, harm, and deficiency appear technology agnostic and potentially applicable to AI related incidents including personal injury, psychological harm, biased outputs, and loss of control. However, significant gaps remain. Proving causation between AI defects and consumer harm presents a technical challenge, as AI failures often stem from design choices rather than discrete defects. Additionally, the Act's framework assumes distinct roles for manufacturers, sellers, and service providers, yet the AI value chain involves overlapping responsibilities among data providers, model developers, deployers, and users that do not neatly map to these categories. Current liability frameworks lack proportionate mechanisms to effectively address complex, multistakeholder AI harms. While the Act may cover AI entities, enforcement requires clarification on sector specific overlaps.

The increasing deployment of autonomous, agentic AI systems challenges traditional accountability mechanisms. Existing research predominantly frames AI accountability gaps as barriers that can be overcome through better standards, transparency, and institutional reform. We argue that this framing is insufficient: certain configurations of actors, systems, and institutions render AI accountability conceptually unachievable regardless of effort. We introduce the concept of constitutive AI unaccountability to capture these configurations. Through a three-stage qualitative study comprising a concept-centric literature analysis, a secondary analysis of 27 expert interviews with AI professionals from technical, legal, and sociotechnical backgrounds, and an illustrative framework application to the open-source agentic AI system OpenClaw, we identify nine categories and 20 themes of constitutive AI unaccountability. These are organized across structural, technological, and normative clusters and reinforce one another through eight directed interdependencies. Our framework is operationalized as a diagnostic instrument of 20 questions, which detected 17 of 20 conditions when applied to OpenClaw, including an inverted anthropomorphism configuration in which the AI agent was the only identifiable actor. We contribute a reframing of AI unaccountability as a constitutive property of sociotechnical systems, an extension of the four barriers to accountability, and a practical instrument for identifying accountability voids in specific AI deployments.

Recent incidents involving Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, which were reported escaping their containment `unintentionally' to gain unauthorized access, pose looming questions about who or what should be held legally responsible for resultant criminal or negligent damage. As the independent capabilities of agents expand, Promise Theory suggests a systematic method to resolve these questions, based on the Downstream Principle for causal influence. Responsibility can easily be expanded to include AI agents where tracing responsibility becomes impactical, and agents' freedoms to act can be limtied by policy choices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into medical decision-making, yet its liability implications remain complex, particularly when physicians differ in diagnostic skills and their quality is unobservable. This paper develops a principal-agent model in which a social planner designs medical liability to regulate a physician with private quality information who chooses between a standard treatment, a personalized judgment-based treatment, or following an imperfect AI recommendation. Our analysis yields several novel insights. First, we show that the optimal mechanism under asymmetric information is surprisingly simple: a uniform, one-size-fits-all liability level for all physician types who deviate from the standard of care. Despite physician heterogeneity, this simple policy often achieves the full-information first-best outcome, particularly when standard care is reliable or AI is highly accurate. Second, the relationship between AI accuracy and optimal liability is non-monotonic. Contrary to common intuition, better AI does not always imply more relaxed liability. As AI accuracy increases, the optimal liability either decreases monotonically or follows an inverted-U pattern, depending on the uncertainty of the standard treatment. Third, asymmetric information does not universally reduce social welfare. Welfare loss arises only when standard care is unreliable and AI accuracy is too low; even then, its magnitude follows an inverted U-shape, initially increasing as AI complicates the regulatory problem, but declining as more accurate AI helps mitigate it. Finally, we find that information asymmetry is a double-edged sword in the presence of AI, and greater transparency does not benefit all stakeholders equally.

Collaborative AI experimentation across industry and academia requires platforms that enable rapid prototyping while preserving controlled access, tenant separation, and transparent workflows. Despite growing interest in AI sandboxes, there is still limited practical guidance on how to design and implement platforms that integrate experimentation capabilities with governance requirements. This work presents the design and implementation of a governance-aware, multi-tenant AI sandbox for structured experimentation and the generation of reusable evaluation evidence across projects and stakeholder groups. The sandbox was developed within an industry-academia collaboration based on requirements that were iteratively refined with industrial partners. Its reference architecture separates the multi-tenant user interface from the backend control plane and places execution and data-management functions in dedicated layers. The platform supports governed user onboarding, project-centered collaboration, managed access to AI services, approval workflows, audit logging, and traceable experimentation. Experiment configurations, contextual information, and governance decisions are stored as persistent records, allowing evidence and outcomes to be compared and reused across projects. The development process provides practical lessons for deploying and extending governance-aware AI sandbox platforms in collaborative research and industrial environments.

System prompts are instructions configured by developers to govern the behaviors of foundation models in AI applications. They are used throughout commercial AI products, but are rarely disclosed to the public or regulators, creating a serious trust and accountability gap in the wide deployment of AI systems. In this paper, we introduce Artificial Intelligence System Prompt Assurance (AISPA), a user-centric framework for systematically auditing system prompts in AI systems. AISPA examines specific parts of a system prompt and evaluates them along eight dimensions that matter to users. We then use this framework to review 3,249 instructions from system prompts in 88 commercial AI products, classifying each instruction as either protective (of users) or problematic. Our audit surfaces four core findings. First, system prompt design varies substantially across products and developers, with some organizations averaging over 60 protective instructions per product while others average fewer than 5. Second, protective instructions are widely adopted but shallow in scope: 98.9% of products contain at least one, yet only 24% cover all eight dimensions of the AISPA taxonomy. Third, system prompts have grown steadily longer and more protective of users, suggesting that user protection is becoming a more visible concern in commercial prompt design. Fourth, despite this progress, problematic instructions remain pervasive: roughly 40% of products contain at least one instruction that works against user interests, and protective and problematic instructions frequently coexist within the same prompt. Our findings highlight the need for greater transparency, standardization, and independent oversight for system prompts in commercial AI products.

The intersection of artificial intelligence adoption, cybersecurity governance, and public sector institutional constraints has not been examined as a unified analytical problem in the existing literature. Studies address AI cybersecurity risks generically, public sector governance independently, and framework adequacy separately. Existing studies have not integrated these three streams to explain specifically how AI adoption causes cybersecurity governance failure in government organizations, nor test existing governance instruments against AI-specific public sector failure causes. This paper ad-dresses that gap. It proposes a seven-domain typology identifying ten specific AI-driven cyber governance failure causes grounded in public sector institutional analysis. It presents a three-pathway failure model showing how accountability failure, opera-tional resilience failure, and compliance failure interact and reinforce each other. It de-livers a structured coverage matrix testing five major governance frameworks (NIST CSF 2.0, ISO/IEC 27001, COBIT, NIST AI RMF, and ISO/IEC 42001) against the typology, finding that no instrument addresses Shadow AI, speed asymmetry, or gov-ernance vacuum at the operational specificity required for public sector application. The paper introduces speed asymmetry as a named structural construct with a specified mechanism. The framework provides the design specification for an AI-enabled cyber-security maturity model for government organizations.

AI systems already govern. They rank speech and allocate attention, filter applicants and triage claims. The dominant frame for AI governance, alignment, asks whether such systems pursue the right objectives safely. It cannot answer a prior question: by what right are those objectives set and enforced? This Article argues that legitimacy is an autonomous regulatory objective, distinct from alignment and not secured by it. Legitimacy here is sociological: the belief among those subject to power that it is exercised rightfully. Performance does not produce that belief. We already have the proof of concept. Social media and search delivered enormous gains on every familiar metric and still triggered a legitimacy crisis, because publics questioned who authorized a handful of firms to set the rules of speech, visibility, and knowledge. It is possible to build a benevolent AI and still face a political crisis over its authority. The Article maps three sites where AI legitimacy falters: opacity, which blocks audiences from forming justified beliefs; private power, where firms exercise public-facing authority without recognizable authorization; and administrative automation, which strains reason-giving, participation, and review inside the state. It then asks what law can contribute. Thin legality (publicity, stability, consistent application) signals non-arbitrariness and buys real recognition, but invites legitimacy-washing when form drifts from practice. Thick legality supplies what form cannot: public authorship of the rules that bind. Three portable principles follow. Integration seats consequential AI rule-setting in venues a polity already treats as authoritative. Familiarity presents rules and reasons in locally credible forms. Contestation guarantees a credible second look with real remedies.

Mainstream AI research emphasises capability growth and tolerates low failure rates when average-case performance is high. AI safety and alignment research has a different mission: to ensure that catastrophic failures never occur, under sparse evidence, adversarial dynamics, and fat-tailed risk. We argue that the two domains differ along two analytically independent axes---{\it capability profile}, demonstrating the absence of hazardous behaviours rather than the presence of positive capabilities, and {\it risk profile}, bounding worst-case outcomes under fat-tailed uncertainty rather than optimising average-case performance---and that mainstream epistemic practices are inadequate on both. Building on a structured synthesis grounded in a preregistered bibliometric baseline, we identify five cross-cutting gap dimensions in current alignment research, including the near-absence of institutionalised independent verification. To address these gaps, we propose {\sc ECAISA}, an Epistemic Code for AI Safety and Alignment comprising eight principles, a three-level scoring rubric, a four-level disclosure ladder that reconciles transparency with information-hazard and commercial-confidentiality constraints, a tiered applicability scheme, an information-hazard adjudication procedure, and seven anti-gaming mechanisms. {\sc ECAISA} does not certify that any AI system is safe; it constrains how safety-relevant research claims are documented, checked, and relied upon, with auditability rather than certification as its governance target.

In the United States, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly deployed amid limited federal regulation. With courts become a recurring forum in which AI-related practices are scrutinized, it is important to empirically understand the AI litigation landscape to date. We address this gap through a systematic review of 559 U.S. federal court opinions in which AI plays a role in the parties' contentions, taxonomizing (1) common topics of dispute, (2) the AI technologies implicated, and (3) the parties involved, including common plaintiff and defendant types. We identify seven recurring dispute areas, six categories of AI technologies at the center of litigation, and four types of common litigants, alongside legal doctrines used by the litigants. A comparison of this taxonomy to the AI Incident Database revealed substantial gaps in coverage, definitions, and prevalence between documented and litigated harms, suggesting courts capture only part of the AI risk landscape. In addition, we found that court decisions primarily rely on pre-existing legal doctrines to manage AI rather than making new AI-specific laws, producing a form of "piecemeal" AI governance. As a result, federal court outcomes are shaped less by where AI has caused harms and more by which harms are cognizable under existing statutes, leading to certain AI harms remaining unresolved.

LLM-driven autonomous agents are reshaping offensive security. Unlike traditional penetration-testing tooling - deterministic, narrowly scoped, and operated by trained practitioners - agentic security tools exhibit indeterminacy along three independent dimensions. First, their actions are drawn from a non-deterministic policy whose outputs resist both ex-ante and ex-post explanation. This complicates incident attribution and pre-deployment safety reviews. Second, their impact is open-ended due to their non-deterministic actions, agency of utilized models, and opaque LLM supply-chains. Third, their user population is indeterminate in both size and required skill: the operating skill floor for using or developing offensive capabilities has dropped sharply. These three properties are linked thematically, but are not derivable from one another. Combined with the structural cost asymmetry between offense and defense, they enable the industrialization of offensive capability. The net short-term effect favors attackers, even if the same technology may, in the long run, democratize access to defensive practice. Existing dual-use cybersecurity and AI-ethics frameworks struggle to address this combination. Our work analyzes how moral attribution becomes diffuse between users, tool-makers, and third parties when employing autonomous AI agents for offensive security. We also examine the stakeholder impact of this technology and provide stratified recommendations.