Failure Briefs

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

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Agent Sandboxes Need Egress Budgets, Not Trust Prompts

Agent Sandboxes Need Egress Budgets, Not Trust Prompts

The live risk in agent security is shifting from "will the model say something unsafe?" to "what can the harness actually touch after the model decides?"...

5 min read
RAG Cost Attacks Turn Retrieval Into a Budget Risk

RAG Cost Attacks Turn Retrieval Into a Budget Risk

A June 2026 paper on retrieval-augmented inference cost attacks reports a failure mode that many RAG teams are not testing: poisoned external documents...

4 min read
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...

10 min read
The Accountability Gap When AI Agents Act

The Accountability Gap When AI Agents Act

When an AI agent causes harm, who pays? Current law can't answer that clearly.

4 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...

9 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
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