Long-form notes from AI security review.
What AI Committees ask for, what regulators read, and what is missing from most threat models. Written for security architects, AI governance leads, and DPOs.
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Threat modeling, governance evidence, and what AI Committees actually need — written for security architects and AI governance leads. No cadence promises.
Presenting AI risk to leadership without the 40-slide deck
Most AI risk presentations to leadership are too long, too technical, and too focused on the threats rather than the decision. This piece defines the structure that gets a governance decision out of a leadership meeting.
Five mistakes that make an AI security review undefensible
Most AI security reviews fail not because they miss threats, but because they miss the structure that makes a decision defensible. These five mistakes appear in almost every review we have examined.
The security terms an AI vendor contract needs
Standard vendor contracts cover SLAs, data processing, and confidentiality. AI vendor contracts need additional terms: model-change notification, training data restrictions, incident notification, and re-assessment rights. This piece defines the clause language.
Preparing for an ISO 42001 internal audit
ISO 42001 requires periodic internal audits of the AI management system. This piece defines what an internal audit must cover, what evidence auditors look for, and the gaps that appear most often in organisations preparing for their first audit.
An MCP server security review checklist
A structured checklist for reviewing an MCP server before connecting it to a production agent. Covers transport, authentication, tool manifest, context injection surface, third-party dependencies, and evidence requirements.
Context-window risks in RAG and how to bound them
The context window is the shared space where user queries and retrieved documents meet the model. Anything in that window can influence model outputs. Context-window risks in RAG are about what gets in — and how to bound it.
Mapping AI security review evidence to EU AI Act articles
Every AI security review produces evidence. This piece maps that evidence to the EU AI Act articles it satisfies, so organisations can trace from their review records to their compliance obligations without rebuilding the evidence from scratch.
Goal hijacking and instruction drift in autonomous agents
Goal hijacking is the attack where a manipulated agent pursues an objective its operators did not intend. Instruction drift is the slow version. Both are harder to detect than traditional attacks because the agent appears to be working.
Guardrails that work vs guardrails that look like they work
Most LLM guardrails are classifiers layered on top of an unguarded model. They can be bypassed. This piece distinguishes the guardrail patterns that provide genuine risk reduction from those that provide the appearance of it.
What evidence an AI security review should produce
A review that produces only a slide deck is not a review. The evidence an AI security review produces must survive a regulator question, a procurement audit, or a post-incident inquiry. Here is what that evidence needs to include.
AI governance that does not become bureaucracy
The failure mode of AI governance is not too little process — it is too much. When the review process becomes the obstacle, teams route around it. This piece defines the governance structures that provide accountability without creating friction.
Finding the AI vendors no one formally approved
Shadow AI — AI tools adopted without formal security review — is in every organisation. This piece defines a practical discovery process: where shadow AI hides, how to find it, and how to bring it into a formal review without alienating the teams using it.
Free resources
Practical templates for every framework covered here.
AI Security Review Template
Full review pack with threat model, controls, and evidence grading.
OWASP Agentic Top 10 Controls
Each risk mapped to required controls and lifecycle gates.
AI Risk Disposition Memo
Clearance decision template with rationale and sign-off log.
AI Go-Live Security Checklist
Production gate checklist for security architects and CISOs.