Subscribe
Subscribe — The Mercury Brief at FairByDesign

The deeper layer of FairByDesign reporting and research.

The public publication tells you what we found. Mercury Intelligence lets you go behind the finding: full investigations, research papers, evidence notes, technical analysis, frameworks, the research archive and the AI Retooling Library.

If AI is changing your profession, Mercury Intelligence also helps you understand which existing skills transfer, where the gaps are and what to learn next.

Subscribe to Mercury Intelligence Get the Mercury Brief free

$10 a month or $100 a year. Full research access from day one.

What members are reading

Recent investigations. Depending on the story, the reporting file behind it can include evidence notes, the source trail, a chronology, technical analysis and the questions still unresolved.

The Doom Dividend

A frontier-AI researcher walks away, and a familiar warning about advanced AI resurfaces.

The Kill-Switch Test

The button says stop. What actually stopped?

Can You Reconstruct What Your AI Did?

The Reconstruction Principle, and why most AI governance fails the test.

All investigations →

The full Mercury Intelligence archive.

Choose your depth

The Mercury Brief

$0/mo

Public journalism, free

  • The weekly Mercury Brief: what happened, what we found, what matters and what we’re investigating next
  • Public-interest analysis and updates
  • Podcast and video links
  • Occasional visuals, diagrams, and selected open resources

Included: the AI Retooling Library

The AI tool experience
Ooh, a shiny new tool!
Month 1: $20 and it’s magic.
Month 2: that feature is now “Pro.” +$100.
Month 3: “you’ve hit your limit.”
Month 4: it’s a baseline feature in the other tool you also pay for.
You never owned anything. You rented the anxiety.
Usage limit reached
Your deadline is now our hostage.
Daily cap. Weekly cap. Monthly cap.
Surge pricing on your panic.
Funny how the throttle always hits at 4:55pm.
Own your tools. Don’t rent your breaking point.
AI vendor security review
Can we audit the model?
“It’s proprietary.”
Where is our data processed?
“Trust us.”
Can we self-host it?
“That’s Enterprise.”
What changed in the last update?
“Improvements.”
Open source answers all four — without a sales call.
Know what you’re actually getting
Proprietary vs Open-weight vs Open-source
ProprietaryClosed. You can’t inspect it. You rent access and take their word.
Open-weightYou can run and probe the model — but the training data and source aren’t fully open.
Open-sourceCode and weights you can read, audit, self-host, and keep.
Auditability isn’t a feature. It’s the whole difference.

What the free brief is for

The Mercury Brief is FairByDesign’s public journalism and the way to follow the reporting: what happened, what we found, what matters and what we’re investigating next. No hype roundups. No content treadmill. Just the reporting worth following.

It also helps you keep pace with the changing professional landscape around AI. Selected editions point toward open-source tools, books, research, courses and emerging skill signals for people retooling across AI, cybersecurity, data, automation and governance — with a deeper, curated version in the AI Retooling Library.

What Mercury Intelligence is for

Mercury Intelligence is for readers who want to go behind the public story: the full investigations, research papers, evidence notes and archive. It is also for people retooling for AI work: it helps you see which of your existing skills transfer, name the gaps no one spells out, and follow a curated path of research, frameworks, tools and reading to a clear next move.

Where to go next

Books & Practical Guides

If you want structured, topic-based guidance, explore the field guides including Public AI Reality, Operational AI Readiness, and EU AI Act for Builders and Operators.

Training & Team Support

If you are working at the organizational level, FairByDesign also offers EAAD, team workshop sprints, and implementation clinics for teams moving from understanding to execution.

Want to support the reporting itself?

Mercury Intelligence is paid access to the deeper reporting. Support is different: it keeps the public reporting, Evidence Lab work, podcast and open resources available to everyone.

© FairByDesign