The Answerability Fuse: A Statutory Trigger for Reconstructable Decisions

Frontier AI governance is calibrated to catastrophe — to severe, capability-driven risks of the kind that threaten national security or the loss of human control. No framework of that kind has a trigger that fires when a lawful and non-catastrophic deployment leaves an institution unable to reconstruct and defend a decision it has made. This paper names that harm ‘answerability capture’, marks it off from explainability and from accountability, and argues that it forms across composed systems whose parts are each individually compliant. Its deeper source is a loss of evaluative control: where the criteria governing a decision fall outside the reach of every actor in the chain, even a complete record can yield no account, and the window for revising the decision closes faster than retrospective review can engage. Existing decision-level doctrines cannot reach it, and the trust now offered in its place is reputational confidence rather than a capacity that can be tested. The paper proposes an ‘answerability fuse’: a statutory escalation duty, held by a body outside the institution governed, that fires on three defined occasions and can compel disclosure and the preservation of evidence, with a rebuttable temporary restraint where those do not suffice. Current standards practice shows these controls are already feasible, so what the proposal adds is the condition on which they fire and the external hand that holds them.