Black Box Notes

On opacity, auditability, and the limits of trust in modern AI systems.

Department

Field Reports

Field Reports are practitioner walk-throughs. A contributor with direct access to a working audit, a deployment scenario, or a production system writes about what they saw and what they could and could not verify. Field Reports are the publication's closest thing to a how-to column — without ever quite landing on a single right answer.

Recommended

Full archive — 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Ten Operators Building Auditable AI Systems

    A reluctant listicle. We do not normally publish them. We are publishing this one because the gap between 'firms that claim auditability' and 'firms that ship it' has gotten wide enough to warrant …

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