Information flow ↑ · legal individual

Whistleblower primacy

External evaluation sees only what labs release; insider disclosure is the only route to ground truth on capability trajectory, safety culture, and incidents.

Mechanism

Legally protect and financially reward insider disclosure (SOX / FCA / FCPA analogue), with technical channels that make leaking cheap.

Falsification signal

A major safety incident is known internally and not disclosed even under the new regime.

A strategy held without a falsification signal is not strategy; it is affiliation. Continued support after this signal lands is identity, not bet. See the identity diagnostic.

Historical analogue

Aviation · Aviation whistleblower protections

Every strategy inherits a plausible ceiling from its precedent. The analogue conditions the realistic reach.

Produced

Legal safe harbour that surfaced safety-critical information.

Did not produce

Coverage narrow; retaliation still occurs outside explicit protections.

Addresses 2 failure scenarios

all scenarios →

Frontier model deceives operators Evaluation abandonment under pressure

Coordinates

Primary leverInformation flow (Open)

Acts onlegal individual

Coercionstate coercion

Actor in controlhumans

Time horizonhorizon neutral

Legitimacy sourcestate

Conflicts, grouped by mechanism

Lever opposition

same lever, opposite pull

The pair's primary lever is the same; they pull it in opposite directions. A portfolio containing both is internally incoherent on that lever.

Closed weights mandate

Complements, grouped by mechanism

Shared authority

same legitimacy source

Different levers, same legitimacy source (democratic, state, technical, market). The pair hangs together under one kind of authority; it stands or falls with that authority.

Criminal liabilityLiability driven safetyGovernance first

Adjacent bet

different levers, loosely coupled

Different levers, different directions of action. They reinforce only via the general principle that covering more bets dominates covering fewer.

Interpretability first

Same-side diversification

same side, different lever

Both act on the same side (AI or world) but pull distinct levers. They cover several failure modes on that side while leaving the other side uncovered.

Bureaucratic slowdown

Same-lever twins

Both use the same lever in the same direction. Usually redundant inside a portfolio: each dollar or effort unit only buys one lever pull, even if two strategies are named.

Information integrity firsttwinOpen source maximalismtwin

Axis position

What the strategy acts onLegal / individual

Coercion levelState coercion

Actor in controlHumans as principals

Time horizonHorizon-neutral

Legitimacy sourceState

Source note: Whistleblower primacy strategy.md