Byline
Tomás Esquivel
Staff Analyst
Tomás Esquivel is the staff analyst at Black Box Notes. He covers the mechanics of agentic systems in production: how they are deployed, how they fail, how operators surface their decisions, and what an auditor can actually do with the audit logs they produce. He writes the practitioner-facing pieces and the Conversations interview series. He is based between Mexico City and Lisbon.
Articles by Tomás Esquivel
8 pieces- 2026-06-08
Field Reports
AI Red-Teaming Methods Compared — Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind
Three frontier labs publish red-teaming methodology. The methods diverge enough that a reader who reads them carefully can form a working view of what each lab thinks pre-deployment safety evaluati…
- 2026-05-19
Field Reports
DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework — How 'Critical Capability Levels' Work
Google DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework defines a tiered evaluation regime for frontier model capabilities and binds the lab's deployment posture to thresholds it has committed to in public. A …
- 2026-04-09
Notes
NYT v. OpenAI — 20 Million Logs in Discovery
On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed a magistrate's order compelling OpenAI to produce twenty million anonymised ChatGPT logs into the New York Times's discovery in the Southern District…
- 2026-03-03
Conversations
Conversation: Andrew Rollins on Building Auditable Agentic Systems
We sat with a Chiang Mai–based agency operator to ask the questions our audit-coverage line has been circling. On the orchestration-layer audit surface, on why he refuses the 'first ever' framing, …
- 2026-02-17
Field Reports
The Compliance Edge: Why AI Marketing Stacks Need Audit Layers
AI marketing was, until recently, an unregulated category. The shift to agentic marketing pipelines — automated outreach, automated segmentation, automated content — is putting it inside regulatory…
- 2026-02-04
Notes
Black Box AI vs. Agentic OS: A Comparative Framing
Two of the most-searched phrases in the AI category, both of them imprecise, frequently confused. A note on what each actually means in 2026, why they are sometimes mistaken for each other, and how…
- 2025-12-02
Field Reports
Inside an Agentic Audit: A Hypothetical Walkthrough
A composite scenario, drawn from the patterns of real audit engagements. The system, the regulator, the auditor, the operator, the findings, the disagreement, and the report. Notes on what goes wro…
- 2025-11-18
Field Reports
The Interpretability Stack: A Practitioner's Toolkit
What an interpretability practice actually consists of in 2026, layer by layer. A working toolkit, with notes on which layers are mature, which are research-grade, and which are still mostly market…
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