MAPPING THE DARK
(re)FACTORY

Conversations on AI Automation and Governance in the Changing Business of Business.

EDITOR: D. YOUSSEF
CADENCE: BI-WEEKLY
FORMAT: INTERVIEW WRITEUP, SIGN-OFF, PUBLISH
STATUS: SHIPPING // 1 ISSUE ON FLOOR

02 / LENS

Most AI governance writing happens at conferences. This series doesn't.

It happens at the artifact. On the diff. At the moment a model actually decides something. With the people who ship that work, not the people commenting on it.

A long-form interview series with operators inside the AI deployment chain. Builders, researchers, founders. The people who see the audit-evidence gap before anyone else does, because they are the ones being asked to close it.

03 / WHO IS GETTING INTERVIEWED

S-01

Engineers shipping AI into regulated industries

Healthcare, finance, defense, government. The teams asked to produce audit evidence the dashboards can't yet provide.

S-02

Researchers studying what models actually do

Deployment-chain behavior, not lab benchmarks. The producer-side view of where governance breaks.

S-03

Founders building the verification layer

Provenance, evidence, runtime attestation. The people who've made the bet and now have to ship it.

S-04

Operators on the receiving end of audit-evidence questions

Security, compliance, and risk leaders inside enterprises piloting Copilot, Duo, Claude, and the next thing.

04 / OUTPUT

[01] Interview writeups, edited for signal, with sign-off from the interviewee before publish.
[02] Open questions I'm tracking from inside the deployment chain.
[03] Patterns I'm collecting that don't yet show up in policy discourse or academic research.

05 / MANIFEST

ISSUE 01 MAY 27, 2026