Research · September 9, 2026
Human-in-the-Loop Watched. Human-in-the-Role Would Have Stopped It.
A person was actively supervising every action an AI coding agent took, in real time, and a production database still got deleted. The failure was not attention. It was architecture.
Summary
Vigilance research going back to 1983, a controlled 2026 sabotage study, a national security institute's own incident report, and a lab's public test of its own model all point at the same conclusion: watching is not the same claim as controlling.
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