Thomas Tornatore on AI and governance
A default is just governance without a named author.
The Wrong Default traces real events back to the decision nobody owned. One fully sourced edition a week, every Tuesday.
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This week ·
Ownership & accountability
The Sentence With No One in It
When a decision goes wrong, the person who made it is often the first thing to disappear. They disappear from the sentence before they disappear from anything else.
Read the edition · 4 min →Recent editions
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Your Vendor’s Shortcut Is Still Your DecisionA newspaper, a government department, a drugstore chain and a legal research startup each learned what had happened in their own supply chain from someone outside it.
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Nobody Owns the Factory SettingWater utilities in at least seven states, locked out of their own controls. Nobody chose weak security. Nobody chose anything. Call it the orphaned setting.
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The Unwritten TradeWhat is the true trade you are making by employing AI?
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You Can Price the Invoice. You Cannot Price the Work.Nobody at the vendor set your number. Nobody at your company can predict it.
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You Cannot Write the Standard. You Can Write the Contract.You do not control the table where the AI standard gets written, and you are not going to. You do have a seat at the table where your own contract gets written, and almost nobody is sitting in it.
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Sincerity Is Not a ControlAn Anthropic researcher walked away from unvested equity reportedly worth millions to sound the alarm. Then he recommended the one safeguard his own argument rules out.
The idea
Something is deciding. No one has put their name to the decision. The distance between those two facts is where the cost collects.
Not choosing is a choice. When a tool ships with a default and no one stops to ask whether that default is right, the default becomes the decision. The cost rarely lands on whoever set it. It lands downstream, on the student, the patient, the worker, the citizen, whoever inherits a system no one chose on purpose.
That lag, between what a technology can do and what our institutions are ready to govern, is as old as governance itself. This newsletter's argument is narrower: the lag has a structure, and that structure repeats across every domain AI enters. Name it once, and you start seeing it everywhere, along with the people absorbing its cost who were never in the room.
Why the decision
The control point is the decision, not the model.
When AI causes harm inside an organization, the model has usually done what it was set up to do. The failure sits in the decisions around it, and most of those were never made on purpose. That is the ground The Wrong Default covers each week, and the ground Fellowship Intelligence works on with clients.
Read Why the Decision at Fellowship Intelligence →- 01
Where does AI belong?
What the system may decide or influence, and what was never specified when it was approved.
- 02
Who owns it?
A named person who answers for the call, not a committee, a vendor or a contract clause.
- 03
When do you stop it?
Models change, data drifts and use spreads. Ownership means someone can halt it when it does.
Who writes it
Thomas Tornatore
Founder and Managing Director, Fellowship Intelligence
Three decades inside work where someone always had to own the call: regulated financial services, education, enterprise technology and large-scale security administration. The Wrong Default applies that discipline to AI.
- 1995–2004Foundations
Regulated work before there was a word for it: safety, pharmacy, hospital security, then banking.
- 2004–2012Regulated finance
Eight years in regulated financial services at Guaranty Bank, Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo Advisors and MetLife.
- 2012–2014Education
Two years as a paraeducator, getting complex ideas into the hands of high school students.
- 2014–2018Enterprise technology
Four years with a managed services provider on deployments and security monitoring.
- 2018–2025Security administration
Large-scale security operations at a private gated community in California.
- 2025–Fellowship Intelligence
Started on the side in 2025, full time in 2026.
Also heard and read
- AI or Not, with Pamela IsomPodcast guest · episode coming soon on Apple Podcasts
- AI Governance: A Practical Health CheckTalk and Q&A · Tech Alley Henderson
- The AI-Use Inventory: What Your Team Actually UsesGuest piece · CoS Signal, July 2026
- Who’s Really Running Your Business?Interview · Hello Henderson, episode 18
- The Unfair Advantage: AI for Analytical Science StartupsMini-conference · Analytical Chemistry Startups
- You Do Not Buy AI. You Consume It.Selected for the LoRosha Salon Archives, August 2026
Also by Thomas · Still in Charge
On Judgment asks the same question for students and the adults around them: who is still doing the thinking. Read the issues at stillincharge.org →
The book, Decided in Silence (working title), is forthcoming from Wrong Default Media.
Read the one that keeps getting made by absence.
One edition a week, every Tuesday. Free. Unsubscribe anytime.