This document does not propose regulatory requirements, mandatory clauses, or contractual obligations.
It provides descriptive reference questions that may be considered during procurement, vendor selection, SaaS adoption, API integration, or outsourcing decisions involving autonomous systems.
When reviewing procurement or contractual adoption, consider:
- Does the contract explicitly preserve human override authority?
- Is decision accountability clearly attributable to a named entity?
- Are responsibility boundaries defined between vendor and operator?
- Does the agreement allow unilateral autonomy expansion without review?
- Are update mechanisms capable of materially altering system behavior?
- Is reliance increasing without corresponding oversight adaptation?
Boundary responsibility and symmetric friction questions:
- Does the adoption process identify who is responsible for friction design, operation, evidence preservation, verification, and correction before irreversibility?
- Does the contract preserve reviewable evidence before affected humans or institutions lose voice, position, or re-entry capacity?
- Does the agreement prevent responsibility from being bypassed through outsourcing, subcontracting, entity replacement, opaque updates, or unilateral scope expansion?
- Does the procurement process avoid making responsible vendors competitively weaker than vendors that externalize displacement, review, or recovery costs?
- Is there a named correction owner if the boundary condition is not preserved?
This checklist is descriptive and non-prescriptive. It is intended only to clarify responsibility continuity within procurement and contractual processes.
Boundary Responsibility and Symmetric Friction
- Does the deployment process identify who is responsible for designing and operating friction, preserving evidence, verification, and correction before irreversibility?
- Does the contract preserve verifiable evidence before affected people or institutions lose voice, standing, or the ability to re-enter?
- Does the contract prevent responsibility from being bypassed through outsourcing, subcontracting, corporate restructuring, opaque updates, or unilateral scope expansion?
- Does procurement avoid placing responsible vendors at a competitive disadvantage to vendors that externalize replacement, review, or recovery costs?
- Is a correction owner identified when boundary conditions are not preserved?