We talk about guardrails all the time in artificial intelligence.

Put guardrails around the model. Put guardrails around the data. Put guardrails around what the system can do.

And generally, I'm in favour of them.

But this week, something happened that made me realize there is a question underneath all of that safety language that we don't ask nearly enough:

Who gave the guardrail authority?

In 2024, the AI company Anthropic began an internal operation called Project Panama. Court records later revealed that the company purchased millions of second-hand books in large batches. The bindings were removed, the pages were scanned at industrial scale and the remains were sent for recycling.

(The factual backbone is supported by the Bartz v. Anthropic court order⁠, the U.S. Copyright Office’s fair-use guidance⁠, the Washington Post’s Project Panama investigation⁠, the Guardian’s reporting on rare-bookseller concerns⁠, and Canada’s Copyright Act provisions on fair dealing⁠.)

Last season, we spent time exploring RAI - Relational Abundant Intelligence - and the idea that our future with artificial intelligence cannot be built only around capability….It must also be built around relationship.

Around trust, around responsibility….and around the human beings affected by the systems we create.

This season, I want to move that conversation into governance.

Not governance as a pile of policies sitting unread in a shared drive.

Not governance as a department that is brought in at the end of a project to approve a checklist.

And not governance as an attempt to slow innovation down.

I mean governance as the architecture that makes responsible innovation possible.