Most businesses adopting AI are quietly betting on one of two things: that the AI company will get the model right, or that their own people will use it responsibly.

Both bets will likely fail, and in opposite directions.

Earlier in this series I argued Asimov’s mistake was putting his entire safety framework inside the robot’s head — and that nearly every story is about that backfiring. Today, we’re repeating the mistake.

The first comfortable answer is "let the vendor handle it." Get a well-built model from a serious company and the safety is baked in, so I don’t have to think about it. The problem: anything built at the model level is necessarily general. It cannot know your industry’s regulations, your client’s risk tolerance, or whether the document in front of it is going to a teammate or a regulator. The higher up a rule lives, the more universal it is — and the less it knows about your actual situation. The vendor can stop the model from doing obviously terrible things. It cannot make the thousand context-specific judgments your business runs on.

The second comfortable answer is the opposite: "we’ll train our people to use it well." Push the responsibility down to the individual. The problem here is subtler and, I think, worse. If every safeguard depends on each person exercising perfect judgment in the moment, you’ve built your framework out of the most variable component in the whole system — a busy human on a deadline. "Train them to be responsible" is often how an organization quietly launders the hard work onto individuals who can’t carry it alone.

Notice what both answers have in common. Each one hopes the framework lives entirely somewhere else. The vendor hopes the client handles context. The client hopes the vendor handled safety. The everyday employee assumes someone above them set the rules. Everyone is pointing at a different layer.

That gap — the place nobody owns — is exactly where the failures will regularly happen.

Next: the three layers a framework actually has to live in at once — and the one in the middle that almost everyone is skipping.