You cannot prompt your way to safety. You cannot fine-tune your way to compliance. A trustworthy agent is one running inside a system designed so that any reasonable model — and many unreasonable ones — produces only acceptable outcomes.
Authority follows blast radius, not capability.
What an agent is allowed to do is a function of how recoverable the action is — not how clever the model behind it appears to be in a demo.
Defense in depth means three phases, not three vendors.
Pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight validation catch non-overlapping failure classes. They are not substitutes for each other.
A kill switch is a designed control, not a slogan.
Scoped, triggered, operated, and tested. If your team cannot describe all four, you do not have a kill switch.
The hand-off is a UX problem disguised as a policy problem.
Approval fatigue and automation complacency are the enemies. The interface determines whether oversight is real or theater.
Now: even if the architecture is right, the management model has to change. Section 3.
SECTION 3 →