The series · 7 parts · ~107 min end to end
Sovereignty, delegation, and who answers for what software does
Whether an AI system is safe, fair or accurate is not a question anybody can answer on your behalf. Each of those words contains a blank, and only the organisation that will be answerable can fill it. So the goodness in the title is not a property to be located in a product and verified — it is the reader’s own, and these seven documents are instruments for finding it. Each can be read alone. They also show where that goodness is unlikely to be found, which is the harder half.
For the whole series: All 7 decks · All 7 PDFs
Safe for what, fair by whose measure, accurate to whose tolerance? Each contains a blank only the organisation that will answer for the result can fill. Structural governance against governance by document, and why measuring benefit by how many people use a tool is the trap it appears to be.
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Five questions about who holds the limits, the inspection, the change and the stop. Three vendors’ definitions of sovereignty, and what none of them contains. What a director of Microsoft France told a French Senate commission on 10 June 2025 when asked for a guarantee.
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Five levels of permitted autonomy, from advisory to delegated. The strongest published objection to scales of this kind, engaged with rather than dismissed. Knight Capital on 1 August 2012, and the fact that the word automated appears nowhere in the Privacy Act 2020.
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The document the others refer back to. An identity that is not borrowed, a capability that is not ambient, authority that narrows rather than widens, and a record somebody who was not there can rely on. Each checkable by watching a system work rather than by reading a description.
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Twelve requirements, each marked with whether anything currently requires it — eight of the twelve are required nowhere. What makes a violation impossible rather than merely forbidden. Why the same twelve work for a country and for a golf club, and why a requirement lasting one electoral term is not a requirement.
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No figures, deliberately: a placeholder gets quoted back as an estimate. Four open questions instead, and four questions put to the reader with somewhere to answer them.
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The seventh document, and the only one about the people who published the other six. Two addresses and one company; the dated record of what was built and when, rather than a description of it; what the six established; and the constraint that actually binds, which is not capital. Ends with the proposal and with the ways you would know it is wrong.
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Drafted with AI assistance, then checked and revised by the author. The judgements and the errors are the author’s — declaration.
Version 0.2, September 2026 · licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse is free, including commercially, provided the author is credited and the reuse does not suggest that the author endorses it. agenticgovernance.digital · all papers