The archive

All 34 essays.

The body of work The Wrong Default grows out of, grouped by theme. Each one runs in full on Substack, free; this page is the index.

Ownership & accountability

Nobody Owns the Agent

Every risk team knows who owns a data breach. Almost none can tell you who owns a decision an AI agent just made.

Who Decides What's Critical?

Every autonomous system promises a human in the loop. The question no one asks is who gets to draw it.

You Bought the Whole Stack. Who Owns the Decision?

Every layer of AI security governs what the system can do. None of them governs whether it was right.

The Compliance Agent That Isn't

When the machine is named after the function that failed.

I Swear, Your Honor, The Algorithm Did It.

Running a decision through an AI does not make it the AI’s decision. Regulators have already proven that, twice, with a bill attached.

The missing institution

For most of corporate history, business-critical technology arrived through procurement, legal, and a named owner. AI bypasses all three.

You Cannot Own What You Cannot Count

One company put agents in the C-suite title. Then I went looking for how many agents there are.

The Audit Trail You Don't Have

The Evolving Mindset: Edition 14

Vendor & counterparty risk

What Your AI Contract Doesn't Cover

The enterprise terms you signed with your AI providers protect your prompts and outputs. They say much less about what those providers can observe in everything else.

Counterparty, Not Product

Your AI vendor has its own funding dependencies and its own fragility. No individual risk assessment can see the aggregate. Who owns vendor financial durability inside your organization?

The Underwriter Did the Inventory You Skipped

Buying AI coverage outsources the one governance step you were supposed to own first.

The Insurance Market Already Named Who Owns Your AI

Insurers just repriced AI risk. The bill lands on the company that runs the model, not the one that built it.

The Promise Failed Once. The Warnings Already Fail Today.

Two CEOs warned your AI vendor learns from your usage. The vendors' own policies say otherwise. This has played out before.

You Do Not Buy AI. You Consume It.

Software was a purchase with a signature on it. Consumption is a purchase that happens a few thousand times a day, and nobody signs.

Regulation & legal precedent

The Chatbot That Practiced Medicine

Pennsylvania did not write a new AI law. It used the one it already had.

Provenance Dies at the First Screenshot

California’s AI Transparency Act goes live tomorrow. The law everyone expected Washington to kill verifies where content is born and goes blind exactly where it travels.

New Problem, Old Panel

A government bought a check on its own automated system the way it always had. The product had changed. The purchase had not. What buying AI-assisted assurance actually costs.

The Default Is the Policy

The AI rule financial firms are waiting for is not coming. The obligations are already here.

Not at the Frontier. In Your Inbox.

On June 25, 2026, Google published a white paper, “A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America.” Its position is blunt.

Business leaders don't have to wait for regulation. Governance is a decision you can make now.

There is a pattern emerging in conversations about AI responsibility, and it concerns me.

Governance theater & performance

Governance Theater

Why the most dangerous AI governance is the kind that passes every audit.

AEO Is Selling Control That Doesn't Exist

The trend is real. The promise underneath the marketing is not.

AI Governance: A Practical Health Check

Live from the Tech Alley stage, June 24th, 2026.

Sold on Both Sides

Opinion. The AI-detection business and the AI-cleanup business are the same business. The only real judge was always the reader.

The AI That Needs a Human

When the human is the product and the AI is the marketing.

AI Wrote It. AI Checked It. You Bought It.

The fastest-growing source of governance risk is not the AI your team adopted. It is the code no human ever read, arriving inside what you buy.

Security & control failures

The Boundary Nobody Verified

When "rogue AI" has a very human failure point.

The Attacker Confessed

Usually, a confession ends the threat. This one only revealed it.

The Off Switch You Don’t Control

In June, the U.S. government switched off two of the most capable AI models on the market. Most companies cannot even tell you which models they would lose if it happened to them.

Workplace, talent & reflection

The Old Guard

A new academic finding says the safest jobs for a long career are getting riskier for the workers who held that safety longest. The instinctive explanation is that older workers won’t learn the tool.

Enterprise AI Has a People Problem

The market measures seats. It's missing the people who matter.

Your Organization Is Learning the Wrong Things

The Evolving Mindset: 12th Edition

The Conversation I Keep Having

By Thomas Tornatore, founder of Fellowship Intelligence, an AI governance & strategy advisory firm.

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