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Mercury Brief
The Mercury Brief — FairByDesign’s free weekly signal on AI governance, security, privacy and accountability. Fast, credible orientation on what matters.
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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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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 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…
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Can You Reconstruct What Your AI Did?
Most organizations can describe their AI governance. Far fewer can reconstruct what happened when an AI-enabled decision goes wrong. Paper IV of Project Sentinel introduces the Reconstruction Principle and a…
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The Export-Control Order That Took Anthropic’s Frontier Model Offline
“The off switch was real. It just wasn’t in the building you thought it was.”
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The Accountability Control Plane Public Brief
Most organizations can prove they have an AI policy. Far fewer can prove what actually happened the last time an AI system shaped a real decision.
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MCP Is an Operational Surface. Governance Has to Catch Up.
FairByDesign — Operational AI Governance Series Field Signal Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is mostly discussed as an integration breakthrough. That is accurate, but incomplete. Anthropic introduced MCP on November…
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The Accountability Gap — public Field Paper
AI governance is no longer just about accuracy. It’s about whether anyone stays accountable when AI shapes decisions — the accountability gap, and how to close it.
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The Proof Deficit: Why AI Governance Is Moving From Principles on Paper to Controls in Systems
AI governance is shifting — from principles on paper toward controls running inside live systems. The unresolved problem is no longer a knowledge deficit. The field knows what responsible AI…
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Ratified by the EU, Rewritten in Colorado: AI Governance Diverges
In a single week of May 2026, the EU ratified the first binding international AI treaty while Colorado repealed and replaced America’s broadest state AI law with a narrower automated-decision…