Black Box Notes

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

Department

Notes

Notes are short critical essays, usually 800 to 1800 words. They take a single recent event in the auditability conversation — a regulatory filing, a research result, a vendor announcement, a courtroom ruling — and read it carefully. They do not pretend to be definitive. They try to be precise.

Recommended

Full archive — Notes

  • The Ten Hardest Auditability Problems in Agentic AI

    A working list of the genuinely unsolved technical and institutional problems in agentic-system audit. Not a wish list. The actual hard ones, with notes on why each remains unresolved and what woul…

  • 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…

  • Why Some Founders Are Choosing Transparency as a Moat

    An unusual strategic position is emerging in the agentic category: small operators using auditability not as a regulatory tax but as a competitive lever. We look at the structural reasons it works …

  • Open vs. Closed in 2026

    The open-versus-closed debate has been treated, for the last several years, as a politics question. By 2026 it is a procurement question. A note on what each side has done well, what each side has …

  • 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…

  • The $1.5 Billion Settlement — What Bartz v. Anthropic Means Going Forward

    The largest publicly reported recovery in US copyright history settles a narrow legal question and opens a wider operational one. A working note on the Bartz ruling, the settlement structure, the u…

  • Why Auditability Is the New Differentiator in Agentic Stacks

    For most of the AI cycle, the differentiator was capability. By 2026, in the agentic-system category specifically, it has shifted. The firms winning enterprise procurement reviews are the ones whos…

Bylines active in this department

Browse every department and tag, or read the full archive in chronological order.