Failure Briefs

Postmortem-style analysis of AI system failures, fragility, and production risk.

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Agent Accountability Breaks When the Audit Trail Is Just a Trace

Agent Accountability Breaks When the Audit Trail Is Just a Trace

The EU AI Act's Article 12 now says high-risk AI systems must automatically record events across the system lifetime. Microsoft, in parallel, is migrating...

7 min read
AI Agents in Legal: What Works, What Fails, and What the Sanctions Data Actually Shows

AI Agents in Legal: What Works, What Fails, and What the Sanctions Data Actually Shows

In June 2023, attorneys Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca submitted a brief in a federal case citing six cases that did not exist. ChatGPT had invented them. When the opposing party asked for copies, the attorneys submitted fabricated pages. A judge sanctioned them $5,000 and required them to pers...

10 min read
Why AI Agent Deployments Fail — And What the Survivors Do Differently

Why AI Agent Deployments Fail — And What the Survivors Do Differently

Agent deployments fail for recurring reasons: weak problem framing, brittle long-horizon performance, poor observability, and missing human-in-the-loop controls.

6 min read
Enterprise AI Pilots Have a 70% Failure Rate

Enterprise AI Pilots Have a 70% Failure Rate

S&P Global found 42% of companies abandoned most AI initiatives. MIT reports 95% of GenAI pilots deliver no measurable return. The technology works. The organizational machinery that carries pilots to production doesn't.

4 min read
RAG Pipelines Are Silently Dropping Context

RAG Pipelines Are Silently Dropping Context

Your RAG pipeline retrieves the right documents. The LLM ignores half of them. The RAG-E framework found generators skip the top-ranked passage in 47-67% of cases. The retrieval-utilization gap is the real bottleneck.

4 min read
Red Teams Found Agents Leak More Than Models

Red Teams Found Agents Leak More Than Models

Red teams found agents are far more vulnerable than standalone models. Mixed attack strategies hit 84.3% success rates. Memory poisoning persists across sessions. Every tool is a potential exfiltration path.

3 min read
OpenAI Agents SDK in Production: Traces, Tooling, and Hand-offs That Don’t Break

OpenAI Agents SDK in Production: Traces, Tooling, and Hand-offs That Don’t Break

Build reliable agent workflows with OpenAI Agents SDK: traces, tool-call guardrails, handoffs, retries, and deployment checks.

1 min read
Multi-Agent AI Has a Security Architecture Problem That Better Models Won't Fix

Multi-Agent AI Has a Security Architecture Problem That Better Models Won't Fix

193 documented threats. Agent defection. Reverse SSH tunnels. Why better models won't fix multi-agent AI security — and what actually helps.

1 min read
Your Agent's System Prompt Is Fighting Itself

Your Agent's System Prompt Is Fighting Itself

A framework called Arbiter treats agent system prompts as auditable code. Applied to Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI, it found 152 interference patterns — including critical contradictions and a structural data loss bug — for a total cost of $0.27.

4 min read
Alignment Works in English. In Japanese, It Backfires.

Alignment Works in English. In Japanese, It Backfires.

A new study shows the same alignment intervention that produces strong safety effects in English reverses direction in Japanese, increasing harmful outputs. Tested across 1,584 simulations, 16 languages, and three model families.

3 min read
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