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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.…
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The Kill-Switch Test
The button says stop. Excellent. What stopped? This week’s Mercury Brief follows the AI incidents behind the kill-switch debate—and asks whether the tasks, credentials and consequences stop with the chat.…
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Who Holds the Wheel? Open Source and the Fight for AI Decision Intelligence
The same data that makes AI governable can also make it steerable. That is why control over AI governance matters. Whoever controls telemetry, evaluation criteria, dashboards, and intervention mechanisms can…
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The AI Act Was Reordered Just Before It Bit. Here Is Who Asked.
Europe moved its hardest AI Act deadlines just weeks before they were due to apply. The public record shows which industry requests shaped the Digital Omnibus, which safeguards survived, and…
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Who Sought to Reorder the AI Act? What the Open Record Shows About the Digital Omnibus
The EU moved its hardest AI deadlines just weeks before they were due to apply. This paper traces which industry requests entered the Digital Omnibus, which were rejected, who benefits…