The Compliance Black Hole
Governance exists as process, not as authority
The Compliance Black Hole appears when everyone agrees AI governance matters and nobody can say, in plain language, who is supposed to stop a bad idea before it becomes a strategic dependency. That vacuum is more common than people like to admit, partly because governance sounds like a solved corporate function right up until you ask someone to walk you through the specific workflow under review and they realize they cannot.
Symptom
An engineer raises a clear concern. The concern moves upward through expected channels. Everyone is serious. Everyone is professional. And somewhere in that sequence the organization reveals that it lacks a person with enough authority and enough understanding to say stop — not like this.
Why It Matters
The Compliance Black Hole is not the absence of rules. The rules exist. The concern exists. The danger exists. The connective tissue between the danger and someone with the power and knowledge to act on it does not exist, and the hole in that connective tissue is what the Black Hole fills.
What the Chapter Gives You
Why governance by committee produces governance that nobody owns, how 'we should review this' becomes a substitute for stopping, and the question that reveals the Black Hole: who is the person, not who is the committee?
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