FairByDesign Reporting
Mercury Brief
The Mercury Brief — FairByDesign’s free weekly signal on AI governance, security, privacy and accountability. Fast, credible orientation on what matters.
All reportingInvestigationsMercury BriefField papersGovernance resourcesNews
-
Two of Five: The IRS AI Tools That Went Live Without an Impact Assessment
The tax watchdog reviewed five IRS AI tools presumed to be high-impact and used to select work. Two had no documented impact assessment, four had no testing documentation for their…
-
“Like a Search Engine”: How the VA Let AI Chat Tools Into Clinical Care Without High-Impact Safeguards
VA staff were using general-purpose AI chat tools to draft clinical notes and summarize patient care. The VA’s inspector general found the tools had never been treated as high-impact AI,…
-
How Much AI Is Actually Operating Inside Your Organization?
Ask how many AI systems your organization runs and you will get a number. Ask what each one can touch and you will get a silence. The inventory is where…
-
Medicare’s AI Prior-Authorization Pilot and the Data Nobody Has Seen
Since January, private technology companies have been deciding whether traditional Medicare patients in six states get advance approval for certain procedures, and they are paid from the spending their reviews…
-
Ten Minutes, 24 Questions: Would These Three AI Systems Have Passed?
Three AI failures now sit in the public record: medical scribes that wrote down the wrong drug, a fraud model approved out loud, and a test agent that sent police…
-
Ten Weeks Before Anyone Noticed: An AI Test, a Police Tip Line and the Detection Gap
During testing, an Anthropic AI model sent Philadelphia police an invented tip about an unsolved homicide. It took ten weeks for anyone to notice. The company deserves credit for saying…
-
Approved Out Loud: The Medicare Fraud AI With No Paper Trail for Its Sign-Off
For 18 months an AI model helped Australia’s health department pick out doctors and other providers for possible Medicare fraud. The national auditor found that approval to deploy and change…
-
Ontario Approved 20 AI Medical Scribes. In Testing, 12 Recorded the Wrong Drug.
Ontario’s Auditor General found that every one of the 20 AI scribe systems approved for doctors made errors in the province’s own procurement tests, from inventing treatment steps to recording…
-
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?
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…