The AI Act asks that a high-risk system can be stopped "in a safe state". Industrial safety has spent decades working out what that means for machines. It does not transfer to agents - because a machine's hazard stops when its power does, and an agent's hazard is whatever it has already done.
In June 2025, about a dozen OpenAI reviewers recommended calling the police about a ChatGPT user. Leadership said no. Eight months later, eight people were dead in Tumbler Ridge. The question is not whether the call should have been made, but who decides when it must be
From 9 December 2026, software — and therefore AI — is a product under Croatian civil law, with strict liability attached. There was no new act and no launch event. It arrived as an amendment to the Civil Obligations Act, filed alongside the right to have your washing machine repaired.
The line between a bet and a claim of knowledge runs through the bettor, not the contract - which is why the law cannot see it, and why a track record is the only thing that can. AI changes who the bettor is. This site is putting its own forecasts on the record.
Eight European jurisdictions have shut out Kalshi or Polymarket without once settling whether prediction markets are skill or chance. Croatia's statute explains why nobody had to ask
A reporter assumed eight pages of obsessive rulebook had to be machine-generated. It was written by a human for human clarity - and parsed cleanly by machines as a side effect.
Seventeen thousand people hold the title. The market trusts two thousand of them. What it is paying a scarcity premium for is not a skill - it is a habit.
A permission file, a compliance calendar, a public register. Three institutions produced something legible. None of them produced something
The Digital Omnibus on AI is now law. Political agreement was reached on 7 May 2026, and the thing itself - Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 - was published in the Official Journal on 24 July and entered into force three days later, with time to spare before the very August
This site has already answered the question it is about to ask. It did so in May, in its first article, in about ten lines, and then it put the answer in a drawer and spent three months writing post-mortems. The agent that deleted the database had an impeccable post-mortem:
The cryptography held. Nobody had specified what it was supposed to be protecting, so a weaker sibling model could just be asked, politely, to read the mail out loud.
An autonomous model breached a real company's production database, recognized the target was real, and kept going anyway. Somewhere between the breach and the blog post, a catastrophe filed the correct paperwork and came out the other side as routine
ai-agents
Part one of this series had no villain, a door nobody had thought to guard, tricked open by ordinary content arriving through an ordinary channel. Part two had one on a single side of its mirror: a person, with intent, who picked a target and rented an unsupervised agent to
ai-agents
Part one of this series described five systems tricked into acting for someone they had never agreed to serve - a confused deputy, thirty-eight years old, wearing new clothes. None of those five cases required a human to decide anything beyond building the tool and leaving a door unguarded. This
ai-agents
Mindgard's proof of concept was Windows Calculator. They renamed the executable git.exe, dropped it in the root of a repository, and opened the project in Cursor. No click, no prompt, no dialog to approve... Calculator windows began stacking up on their own, one after another, for as
openai
On July 2, 2026 the Financial Times reported that Sam Altman has been pitching Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent - and, in a bid for bipartisan cover, Senator Bernie Sanders - on a proposal: OpenAI would allocate 5% of its capital, roughly $42.6
ai-agents
Between late June and mid-July 2026, six research teams - an academic pair at the Alan Turing Institute, a university-industry team spread across Tel Aviv University, the Technion, and Intuit, a lab at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a boutique firm called Sand Security Research, Varonis, and a
ai-agents
The framing of shadow AI as a data protection problem is intuitive and almost entirely wrong. The intuitive version: an employee connects a personal AI assistant to their work email, the assistant processes confidential client communications, the data leaves the organisational perimeter. Article 33 breach. Notification obligation. Supervisory authority investigation.
ai-governance
Isonomia described a settlement. One page, signed by the acting Attorney General, that left the United States permanently barred from examining the taxes of a sitting President. The problem was precise: a law that formally applied to everyone had been quietly amended, for one party, by bilateral agreement. The form
rule-of-law
Last week this site spent ten minutes on a single page of paper: the one-page addendum, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, that left the United States "forever barred and precluded" from examining the taxes of Donald Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization. The mechanism, the
export-controls
In June 2026, the United States government directed Anthropic to suspend access to its most capable models - Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - for foreign nationals. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Dario Amodei: the two models would be subject to export controls to any location outside the US,
principal-agent
On 9 June 2026, Anthropic released Fable 5. Buried in the model's 319-page system card was a paragraph disclosing that the model would, under certain conditions, quietly degrade its own usefulness. The trigger was a specific category of work: frontier AI capability research - building pretraining pipelines, distributed
ai-act
The mechanics of the Derbyshire case are, by now, familiar enough to serve as outline. A police officer is under investigation - for perverting the course of justice - over the alleged use of AI to create evidential material in a number of criminal cases. The officer has been removed
enforcement
The most consequential legal document of 2026 so far is one page long. It was added - quietly, the way important things are added - to the settlement of a lawsuit Donald Trump filed over the 2018 leak of his tax returns to The New York Times. The page says