Governance on Tend and Flow

Skill Safety

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:15:42 +0100

OWASP (opens in a new tab) recently published a community-driven project to catalogue the current types of threats posed by skills, calling out the high level of malicious skills being shared publicly out in the wild. Their security checklist is here (opens in a new tab). This is version one, written for developers and technical staff, and will no doubt change and improve over time.

I thought there was real value in having a non-technical version. In many organisations, non-technical users are writing their own skills and, most likely, sharing skills that others have written. Feel free to repurpose my checklist below.

AI Transparency Is Not Enough

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:44:31 +0100

The general direction of AI legislation is to make AI use more transparent and maintain a clear line of accountability for the content. The EU’s AI Act is now in force and while it mostly talks about the responsibilities of organisations making and deploying AI systems, it does also cover businesses using those systems (‘deployers’). In a very broad summary of the Act (opens in a new tab), deployers need to (a) follow the provider’s instructions in using the system, (b) ensure a sufficient level of AI literacy among staff involved in the operating of the AI system, and (c) inform individuals when interacting with the system (“unless it is obvious from the context”). That last point extends further to specific use cases involving media content and so-called ‘high risk’ systems being used to make decisions involving the public. The EU law now sets the baseline for transparency, but it is not governance.

Designing Governance

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:03:57 +0100

The flood of policy dressed up as governance

I have become troubled by how much AI governance turns out to be policy wearing a framework’s clothing. Something goes wrong, or nearly does, and the response is reliably the same: a new document, a committee, a tweaked RACI chart. Everyone relaxes. Governance has been done.

Except it hasn’t. Nobody opens the document again until the next incident forces them to. This is not laziness, the people writing these things mean well and work hard. It is a design failure, and it becomes considerably more expensive the moment you point an AI agent at a real business process.