INDEPENDENT RESEARCH / PRACTICE NOTES

Ideas in motion, not ideas behind glass.¶

This is my working notebook on AI engineering, strategy, knowledge infrastructure, organizational transformation, and the human systems that determine whether innovation becomes real capability.

The notes range from emerging research questions to practical operating models. Some will become papers, tools, talks, or products. Others are here because thinking improves when it is made visible.

Evidence before theater Systems over slogans Useful, accountable AI

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Latest writing

August 8, 2025
in Cybersecurity, AI Assurance, Defense Technology
3 min read

The AI Cyber Challenge makes evaluation operational

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) August 8 announcement reports the results of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). In the final scored round, competing cyber reasoning systems have analyzed more than 54 million lines of code, identified 86 percent of the synthetic vulnerabilities, and patched 68 percent of those identified.

Those figures are impressive. The design of the evaluation may be more important.

July 29, 2025
in Public-Sector AI, AI Governance, Knowledge Management
3 min read

The federal AI inventory is becoming an operating instrument

The United States Government Accountability Office's (GAO) July 29 report finds that generative artificial intelligence (AI) use cases at the federal agencies under review have increased nearly ninefold between 2023 and 2024, from 32 to 282. Across the same inventories, reported AI use cases of all kinds have nearly doubled.

That is more than a growth statistic. It is a warning about the management problem arriving behind the technology.

July 23, 2025
in AI Strategy, Public-Sector AI, Operating Models
2 min read

An AI action plan becomes real at the handoff

The White House's July 23 release of America's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Plan outlines more than 90 actions across innovation, infrastructure, international engagement, and security.

Any plan of that scale contains choices people can debate. The implementation lesson is less partisan and more practical: strategy succeeds or fails in the handoff from an announced action to an accountable operating system.

July 14, 2025
in Defense AI, Software Acquisition, AI Platforms
2 min read

Buying four frontier models is not yet a multi-model strategy

The Department of Defense's (DoD) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) details prototype awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI on July 14. Each agreement carries a ceiling of $200 million and aims to develop agentic workflows for national-security missions.

The awards create access and competition. The next challenge is turning provider diversity into architectural leverage rather than four separate silos.

July 8, 2025
in Cybersecurity, Defense Technology, Innovation Management
3 min read

Open cyber tools still need a transition strategy

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) July 8 announcement commits the finalists' cyber reasoning systems from its Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge to an open-source release after the final competition.

Open release can accelerate diffusion. It does not, by itself, create adoption.

June 30, 2025
in Cybersecurity, Supply Chain, National Security
2 min read

Semiconductor security is a coordination problem

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) June 30 framework for analyzing collusion threats in the semiconductor supply chain provides a way to compare threats involving adversaries at different stages of the chain and to reason about security-cost tradeoffs.

Its deeper value is a reminder that supply-chain assurance cannot be reduced to evaluating one supplier at a time.

June 25, 2025
in AI for Science, Decision Systems, Trustworthy AI
3 min read

AlphaGenome and the discipline of decision support

Google DeepMind's June 25 introduction of AlphaGenome presents an artificial intelligence (AI) model that predicts how changes in deoxyribonucleic acid sequences may affect gene regulation across multiple molecular processes.

The scientific capability is impressive. The framing of its limits is equally instructive for anyone building high-stakes decision support.

June 18, 2025
in Agentic AI, Interoperability, AI Security
2 min read

The protocol is becoming an organizational boundary

Anthropic's June 18 update adds remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to Claude Code. Developers can connect the coding agent to hosted tools and knowledge sources without operating each integration locally.

This is convenient infrastructure. It also moves an important boundary: the agent can now cross from a code repository into project systems, observability platforms, knowledge bases, and other services through a common protocol.