标签：#legalai

Where AI incidents in legal actually come from, and what infrastructure (not policy) prevents them. Blake Aber · Predicate Ventures · 2026 The policy layer is table stakes. It isn't enough. When Sullivan & Cromwell apologized to a federal bankruptcy judge in April 2026 for AI hallucinations in a court filing, the firm's apology letter said the firm had policies. Safeguards existed. Those safeguards weren't followed. That framing, "the safeguard existed but wasn't followed," is how a policy failure gets described. But something more specific happened: a hallucination was generated, wasn't caught at generation time, wasn't caught at review time, and made it into a document that got filed. That's not a policy problem. It's an infrastructure problem. The distinction matters because it determines what you build next. What policy can and can't do Policy is a promise made before the event. A well-written AI acceptable-use policy says: don't submit output you haven't reviewed; verify citations before they go into a document; a human must approve anything client-facing. This works when the human executing the task has time, attention, and professional accountability in that moment. It fails when one of those is missing: a deadline, a junior practitioner, a late-night run. Policy can't: Verify a citation at the point of generation Flag output that has drifted below a confidence threshold Stop hallucinated text from appearing in a draft before a human ever sees it Detect when the underlying model is behaving differently than it was in testing Policy can: Set the expectation that review must happen Define who bears accountability when it doesn't Create a paper trail after the fact One of those is prevention. The other is compliance. What infrastructure does instead An AI harness layer operates at the point of generation, not at the point of review. This reflects a broader reality that production AI is mostly harness and very little model . For legal work specifically, three com