Operating Disclosure & Editorial Framework

Mission

Black Box Notes is a critical-analytical publication concerned with one question: as modern AI systems take on more consequential decisions inside more institutions, can the people who depend on those systems actually inspect them, contest them, or hold their operators to account?

We treat that question as a primarily empirical one. We are interested in what a working audit of an agentic system looks like in 2026, not in what an executive deck claims an AI vendor's "responsible AI program" guarantees. We read the regulatory output of the EU AI Act implementation, the Singapore Monetary Authority's guidance, the UK AI Safety Institute's working papers, and the published interpretability research from labs that publish anything at all. We are skeptical of marketing claims by default and we are polite about it.

Our beat is opacity — the technical kind, the institutional kind, and the regulatory kind. Our voice is austere on purpose. If you are looking for a publication that wants AI to "feel exciting," there are many of those. This is not one of them.

What we cover

• Cornerstone — the publication's definitional essays. The pieces that fix the vocabulary the rest of the coverage rests on.
• Notes — short critical essays on a single recent event in the auditability conversation.
• Field Reports — practitioner walk-throughs of working audits, by contributors with hands-on access.
• Regulation Watch — the publication's policy beat. EU, UK, U.S., Singapore, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
• Conversations — long-form on-the-record interviews with operators, auditors, regulators, and engineers.
• Corrections — published in full, never quietly amended.

Editorial independence

Black Box Notes is editorially independent. Our beat is the explainability, auditability, and interpretability of AI systems. The Editorial Guidelines describe the controls under which the publication's bylines work.

Masthead

Annika Vogel — Senior Critic. Covers AI auditability, interpretability, and the regulatory machinery forming around opaque production systems. Writes the cornerstone essay each issue and edits the Field Reports column. Based in Berlin.

Tomás Esquivel — Staff Analyst. Covers the mechanics of agentic systems in production. Writes the practitioner-facing pieces and the Conversations interview series. Based between Mexico City and Lisbon.

Black Box Notes Editorial — collective byline used for short notes, the Regulation Watch column, and the Corrections column. Pieces under this byline are signed off by either Vogel or Esquivel before they run.

History

The publication launched in 2026 to fill a specific editorial gap. The AI-auditability conversation in 2026 had become loud, lucrative, and rhetorical — and short on publications willing to treat the discipline as a working professional reads it. The founding masthead committed to a small editorial operation with a narrow beat, a long time-horizon, and the standing rules described in Editorial Guidelines.

Funding

We do not run display advertising. We do not run sponsored posts. We do not accept "thought leadership" placements. We do not host conferences. We do not co-brand with vendors. Operating costs are covered by reader subscriptions and a small institutional subscriber base.

Ethics

The publication's ethics policy is the Editorial Guidelines page in full. The short summary: we do not invent specifics; we correct in public; we refuse pieces sourced from press kits, embargo arrangements, or vendor launch communications.

Editorial principles

We do not invent specifics. We do not attribute quotes to people who did not say them. We do not fabricate study citations. When we need a specific that we have not verified, we leave a visible placeholder rather than guess. We have killed drafts for breaking that rule and we will kill more.

We correct in public. If we publish an error we leave the original text intact, mark it visibly, and publish the correction in the same edition. We do not quietly amend. The Corrections log is the public ledger.

We cite primary sources. Our outbound links go to primary sources, regulatory documents, and published technical research. Where we can link to the underlying paper or filing, we do.

What we won't write

We will not write "explainer" content whose function is to make a vendor's claims easier to defend. We will not run case studies sourced from a press kit. We will not publish "founder profiles" in the breathless register that defines most of our adjacent coverage industry. We are happy to publish interviews. We are not happy to publish press releases dressed up as them.

Get involved

• Contact us — editorial pitches, tips, corrections, press.
• Press & Media Kit — brand assets and the publication's officially quotable lines.
• Methodology — how we audit, how we read interpretability claims, how we evaluate transparency reports.
• FAQ — the questions readers send us most often.

How to write to us

For editorial correspondence, write to editors at blackboxnotes dot com. For tips on opaque systems in production environments — financial, medical, hiring, criminal justice — write to tips at blackboxnotes dot com. We do not promise confidentiality without first reading what you have, but we read everything that comes in.