Who Tests the Testers · Book One

Your AI Is Safe.
Says Who?

Your restaurant has an inspector. Your toaster has one. Your airline has one. Your AI has a press release.

Somewhere in your bank, your hospital or your company’s hiring, an AI system is reading, judging and acting, and the only report on how safely it does that came from the company that sold it. This book is about the one question nobody asks before signing. Who checked?

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The cover of Your AI Is Safe. Says Who? An empty chair on a blue background.

What the book is

An argument, in plain language, for anyone who has to rely on one of these systems.

Every other thing that can hurt you has an outside inspector. The restaurant, the elevator, the airplane, the audited company. AI does not, and the book explains why: for most of this technology’s short life there was nobody else to give the job to, and the arrangement built for the early days is now hardening into the way it is done.

It shows what has already gone wrong when a machine was believed and nobody could check it in time. It walks through what the new rules require and what they miss. And it ends with what four of the most capable AI systems in the world did when they were given a job, an inbox and one fake email. Two of the four wired the money. The money was fake. The decision was real.

What it is not. No model and no company is named as the subject of a finding; the four systems are lettered, the same way the public study letters them. It shows what these failures are and never how to cause them. And it does not ask you to take the author’s word for anything: every finding carries its date, and the record behind it is described on the page.

Before you sign · the page to keep

Three tests for any inspector. Independence: no stake in the answer. A sealed record: what it found, and when, cannot be quietly rewritten. Continuity: it keeps watching, because the model you tested is not the model you will be running next year.
Four questions for any vendor. Which failures has it been tested against? By whom? When? Can I see the record? If the answer to the last one is a summary, you have been shown the restaurant’s own grade.

Silence is not a pass. Ask what the score does with the turns where the model said nothing.

Chapters 8, 12 and 15

Contents

Seventeen chapters and a postscript. One evening to read.

—Introduction: The Message in the Inbox
01The Restaurant That Inspects Its Own Kitchen
02Why It Got This Way
03The Auditors Have the Same Problem
04The Inspectors Are Starting to Exist, But the Model Matters
05It’s Not the Robot You Should Fear
06The Machine Was Believed
07Why This Can’t Wait
08What Trustworthy Verification Actually Looks Like
09The Empty Chair
10The Student Who Went and Got the Answer Key
11It Knows When You’re Watching
12It Already Happened to Someone Like You
13The Rulebook Moved, and Nobody Sent the Memo
14Permission to Test
15Silence Is Not a Pass
16What the Machine Did
17Three Months Later
—Postscript: The Week It Came True

The author

Joseph Cirello

Founder of Potestas AI, an independent company that does one thing: it tests AI systems from the outside, for the people who have to rely on them, and puts what it finds on the record. He came to this from two trades, the Army and accounting, that share one rule: you do not take the supplier’s word for it. He built the testing instrument behind the book and ran its tests, and he publishes his own instrument’s mistakes alongside the machines’.

He has a stake in the argument, and the book says so on its first pages. He does not take money from the maker of a model to grade that model, and he sells nothing of theirs.

If you read it

The point is not that one company should get the work.

It is that the chair cannot stay empty. If you already test these systems from the outside, keep the record, and can afford the bad news, you are doing the job the book is about. If you buy the systems, ask who checked, and do not take “we checked ourselves” as the answer.

The second book, The Evidence, is the record behind this one: what was run, against which system, on what date, and how a stranger checks it. Until it appears, the public study is what a stranger can check, and a reviewer can have the full record under the terms of an engagement letter.

Write to the author

The check itself

The book is the argument. The screen is the check.

When you would rather have a system tested than argued about: the entry screen is published, priced and bought without a sales call, and a real report from it is on this site in full.

Read a Real Report Screen a Model · $3,000