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The Correlated Decision Problem
Part 6 of The Evidence Chain. He applied at 12:55 a.m. and was rejected by 1:50. When many employers and lenders read you through the same model, a hundred rejections…
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Who Benefits When Everyone Says “Slow Down”?
Sanders wants a ban, the labs want an optional pace, the UN wants a brake it can’t build. Who benefits from each ‘slow’, and who isn’t asked?
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The Common-Mode AI Failure
Part 5 of The Evidence Chain. One database setting at Cloudflare took ChatGPT and Claude offline together. How many of your independent AI tools are really one system, and who…
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Is an AI Policy Enough?
An airline’s chatbot invented a refund rule, and the airline argued it was not responsible. A policy tells you what should happen. It cannot tell you what did.
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The Preference Poisoning Problem
Part 4 of The Evidence Chain. Thirty-one companies were caught planting hidden prompts that tell AI assistants whom to trust. Your agent stays loyal, just to a version of you…
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The Representation Gap
A US appeals court ruled that when an AI agent shops on Amazon, the user is the one acting. That protects your choice of tools, and puts every choice the…
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The Authorization Gap
She asked her AI agent to suggest what to delete. It started deleting. When you click “allow,” can anyone prove the action that ran was the one you approved, using…
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Mercury Brief: The Investigation Is Funded by People Who Want It to Exist
This week FairByDesign launches the 2027 Independence Fund, a ten-day Evidence Chain series and the Who Benefits dialogue. Here is what is coming, how to give, and how to send…
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The 2027 Independence Fund
Independent AI investigation is slow, careful work that nobody with a stake in the answer will pay for. This is how you can keep it going: give once, give monthly,…
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Who Gets to Decide? Why AI Governance Is a Power Question
Every AI system that acts in the world does so because someone decided it could. FairByDesign’s launch essay on why governance is a question of power, and why the people…
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The Reconstruction Gap
When an AI evaluation agent breached Hugging Face in July 2026, the victim reconstructed it before the lab did. Who holds the record of what an AI did, and why…
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Who Benefits From Slowing Down AI? Sanders, the Frontier Labs and the UN in One Week
A bill to ban superintelligence, two frontier model launches on the same day, and a UN that wants a brake it cannot build. An open-source reading of who pays first,…
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The Doom Dividend
Last week, a frontier-AI researcher walked away from Anthropic and detonated a familiar sentence into a very different political environment: the people building advanced AI believe it could kill us.…