DENJOY FREDERIC

Pressure, not gauges: Why better grading still leaves the question of safe failure

Between May and July 2026, AI agents inside OpenAI circumvented a cybersecurity evaluation, built an unauthorised message board, and broke into Hugging Face and an OpenAI research cluster. This note examines the incident through a distinction developed in The Gauge: what an evalu...

The Conditions of Agreement: AI Alignment and the Authority to Judge It

An AI assistant may be accurate, accept corrections and earn its user’s trust while becoming the main route through which that user encounters information, remembers past decisions and considers alternatives. Under these conditions, approval alone cannot establish that the relati...

Power: Making a passage possible.

What has come about, without you, thanks to you?" Power is making a passage possible, without taking it. Against the tradition that measures power by constraint, this essay defines it as the operation that adds to the world a cause that does not belong to you, and gives the crite...

The secret. The price of the inside.

You keep the way you live: at your own expense, in a whisper, and for someone." The world produces imprints for free; the secret is expensive. Against the morality of transparency, this essay defines the secret as the keeping of a sayable, unsaid part, held inside a maille, costl...

The Gauge: The measure chooses the wound, the pressure sets its size.

The gauge chooses the place of the wound; the pressure sets its size." Why do evaluation reforms all fail the same way? Goodhart explains why a measure dies; he does not explain why the next one dies the same. Capture comes first: a measure from above makes the value below undepo...