When someone says “our AI has guardrails,” ask what kind. Most of the time they mean instructions the AI is supposed to follow. That’s a boundary the AI can fail to stay inside.
Picture an AI agent that’s told to only edit draft reports. It does, for weeks. Then a user asks it to “clean up last month’s reports so they match the new format,” and the agent decides that last month’s approved reports count. Nothing stopped it, because the only thing in its way was a sentence.
Continue reading “Deterministic AI Guardrails: Asking vs. Enforcing”