Regulation is a product specification, if you read it that way

Two headlines this week: the UN human-rights chief said the clock on AI regulation is ticking, and California’s governor ordered independent verification of models and a committee on shut-down mechanisms for AI agents. Some companies will read these as threats. I read them as a specification we have already mostly met.

An agent at ELP GPT cannot send, change or delete anything in a customer’s apps without the customer confirming it. That is a kill switch at the level that matters: the individual action. Our specialist runtime is probed every five minutes by a canary that reads but never writes. Our answer guard refuses to show a customer a raw tool call. We did not build these because a regulator asked. We built them because a business will not standardise on an assistant it cannot stop.

My advice to founders is simple. Write down what your system can do without a human, make that list as short as the product allows, and publish it. When the rules arrive, you will be describing your product, not redesigning it.

— Edgar Melo Costa, founder

Founder’s notes are opinion. They are not investment, legal or professional advice.