The Always/Never Audit
AI Governance Document Review: stress-test the promises your AI policy says the system will always keep, and the lines it says it will never cross.
Your AI policy says what the system will always do, and what it will never be used for. Has anyone outside your organisation tried to break those promises?
Somewhere in your organisation there is a document making promises about AI: a responsible-AI pledge, a deployment covenant, an AI use policy, an accountability charter, vendor assurance language, AI clauses in a contract, or a code of conduct. It was written by people who meant it. It has probably only ever been read by people who meant it too.
The readers who matter are different. Procurement teams run claims checks. Works councils and labor advocates look for who holds standing. Regulators look for enforcement machinery behind the word binding. Skeptical employees look for what happens to them when the document fails. A motivated executive reads it the way a locksmith reads a lock.
The Always/Never Audit reads your document the way those audiences will, before they do.
Convene the council on one promise
Before you read another word about it, watch it work. Type a single always/never promise an AI policy might make, and the same six-seat council the full audit uses will try to break it in real time. One line, fifteen seconds, no sign-up.
Want the fully worked version? Read the public teardown of the three frontier safety frameworks, the same audit run on the pledges Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind published for themselves. Or the companion read on the regulators’ own AI rules, the EU AI Act, NIST, the African Union strategy, and China’s measures.
How it works
- 01Checkout and intakeAfter checkout you receive a private intake page. You send the document, up to about 10 pages, plus three lines of context: where it lives, who its hardest audience is, and anything you already suspect is soft.
- 02Adversarial council passThe document is stress-tested through a multi-perspective review: skeptic, cynic, buyer, labor advocate, clinician, counsel. Where different seats converge, you have found a structural problem rather than a matter of taste.
- 03Accountable synthesisThe findings are weighed against the document and signed by one human reviewer with 25 years in social-risk audit and institutional accountability. The council finds; the human judges.
- 04Memo within five working daysYou receive a written hardening memo, PDF and markdown, within five working days of document receipt and confirmed scope.
A concise hardening memo for the promises that matter.
Strengths come first. A document that gets things right deserves to know which things, because those are the clauses worth defending through every revision that follows.
- Which alwayses the architecture can actually deliver, and which are aspiration in present tense.
- Which nevers survive a motivated institution, and which are one reorganisation away from gone.
- Who can enforce what is promised, and who would even detect a breach.
- Where the document overclaims against its validation status.
- Prioritised fixes staged for where you are now: what to change today, at first deployment, and at scale.
Who this is for
You wrote a pledge or covenant because you meant it. Enterprise buyers will test it. Better that the first hostile read is one you commissioned.
Point the audit at a vendor's assurance language before procurement, counsel, or an operational team has to live with it.
The document predates you, the tools have moved, and you suspect the nevers have quietly become sometimeses.
Use a structured outside read before the document goes anywhere expensive, public, contractual, or hard to walk back.
This is a review; it is not a certification. The memo is working input for your team, and no engagement is announced by either side without written agreement. Named reviewer credit on your document is a separate, deeper engagement.
The audit also is not legal advice: it tells you where the promises break structurally, and your counsel tells you what that means in your jurisdiction.
Founder's launch rate through 2026: $295 USD for one document, up to about 10 pages. The standard rate thereafter is $795.
The deliverable is a written memo, PDF and markdown, within five working days of receipt. Questions of scope are answered honestly before the clock starts: if your document is a different shape than this audit fits, you will be told so and refunded rather than stretched.
Larger documents, full revision engagements, and named-reviewer work are scoped individually through the contact form.
Start the Always/Never Audit
Pay securely through Selar. After checkout, you will be directed to the private intake page for document context and delivery notes.
Checkout on Selar - $295 USD