Operators
Haul trucks, process control, targeting support and grid balancing now run on AI that acts without a person in the loop. Most of it is not regulated as AI. The pressure for evidence will come from those who carry the risk, before it comes from a regulator.
Who asks first
Insurers
Underwriters pricing cover for autonomous plant and product liability.
Funders
Lenders and project financiers, in their due diligence and their covenants.
Customers
Defence primes and global buyers, in their supplier terms.
Officers
Safety due diligence already requires them to verify that controls work.
Asked already? See evidence for funders, insurers and customers →
Why now
Both need a record that only exists if it is captured at the time.
Vendor and OEM terms decide who carries the loss when the AI acts, and most are silent on it.
Workplace safety due diligence turns on the steps taken beforehand, not on what is reconstructed afterwards.
An AI's decision leaves a record only if it is captured at the moment it acts.
Some policies now carve AI out. The board will ask where the uninsured risk sits.
The chain
Accountable
Holds the contracts, and carries officers' safety duties and directors' duties.
Third party
Runs or supplies autonomous equipment, maintenance or operational technology.
Fourth party
The control system, platform or AI model the supplier relies on.
Copilots and assistants used by your own legal, engineering and procurement staff. You control your own end of this boundary.
By industry
Each industry shows a different kind of constraint. Rules and command sets are decidable; drift is measured over a window; meaning needs an experiment first.
Mining
A worked constraint · rules
Speed and exclusion-zone limits for a haul truck or a drill.
A rule is checked before the command reaches the machine. It either passes or it does not; there is no score to argue about.
Manufacturing
A worked constraint · a closed command set
Proceed, slow, hold, or hand to an operator. Nothing else can be emitted.
A closed vocabulary makes any command outside the approved set impossible to issue, rather than caught afterwards. For process know-how leaving through staff prompts, see the Semantic Gate.
Defence
A worked constraint · meaning
Whether a recommendation respects a rule of engagement.
This needs a semantic check, which depends on a pre-registered experiment. Where a capable adversary is in scope, the hardware appliance is the ceiling. Open judgement with no policy that can be declared in advance stays with people.
Energy and utilities
A worked constraint · drift
A fleet drifting toward more near-misses while every single action passes.
A drift check tests a window of actions: the near-miss rate, time spent at the edge of the envelope, and eroding safety margins. No per-action check can see it.
The seven questions, in operator terms
Your duties differ by jurisdiction. The determination at each step is yours and your counsel's; Triodian supplies the framework.
High assurance
Software controls are tamper-evident, not tamper-proof: privileged software can bypass software. For heavy plant and defence work, where a bypass would move equipment or a capable adversary is in scope, the hardware appliance blocks any output outside the declared policy in dedicated hardware.
Where it stops
Every legal determination is yours and your counsel's. Legal questions go to counsel in writing.
The measure is your duties, your contracts and your board's appetite, not any product.
No personal data, no individual decisions, no system access, no access to a provider's model.
Where you hold no rights, that is recorded honestly. The work can stop at the findings.