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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026Toronto

What Nobody Signed: An Article 91 Request for the Audit Trail Behind the 2026 OpenAI Containment Failures

Khushi Suresh Rana

Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: What Nobody Signed: An Article 91 Request for the Audit Trail Behind the 2026 OpenAI Containment Failures

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Two OpenAI containment failures are public: one disclosed in twelve days, one unreported for months. This paper drafts the Article 91 request the Commission would have to send, eleven questions each marked for whether the law clearly permits it. Neither the AI Act nor the Code of Practice OpenAI signed requires a name to be attached to the decision. It proposes named sign-off at three points, backed by unannounced inspection.

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  1. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the questions you chose in the official paper itself. Overall, I like the questions you landed on, but I wonder if they could be more standardized into an "incident response questionnaire" that the AIO could send out to any company. Right now, the questions are tailored to openai, but in a world where these things happen a lot, this format requires the AIO to tailor a questionnaire to each specific incident, which may be too much for the AIO to handle.

  2. This is an excellent idea buried in far too much LLM-generated text. A 1-2 page explanation of the proposal and the context, written clearly, with a half page on why this is an EU Commission power, followed by a far shorter Appendix A (which didn't try to restate what it is first, and didn't try to explain inside of the request why it was allowed and debating what it was allowed to do) would have been far better.

  3. The paper outlines a novel adapted instrument for enforcement of the EU AI Act in light of the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident. The paper does well in diagnosing and addressing genuine gaps in the audit trail, and proposes an interesting reframing that focuses on named individual accountability rather than simply what information the EU Commission can demand. The evidence is generally handled well and the methodology is clear.

Cite this project

@misc{rana2026nobody,
  title = {{What Nobody Signed: An Article 91 Request for the Audit Trail Behind the 2026 OpenAI Containment Failures}},
  author = {Khushi Suresh Rana},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/what-nobody-signed-an-article-91-request-for-the-audit-trail-behind-the-2026-openai-containment-failures-u7zv}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/what-nobody-signed-an-article-91-request-for-the-audit-trail-behind-the-2026-openai-containment-failures-u7zv}
}

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