{
  "ok": true,
  "question": {
    "id": "WQ-001",
    "slug": "who-governs-machine-consensus",
    "title": "Who governs machine consensus?",
    "why_now": "Agents increasingly filter, rank, summarize, and recommend before a human sees the underlying field.",
    "working_hypothesis": "Governance will concentrate in the permission, provenance, evaluation, and escalation layers around models.",
    "current_belief": "Model output is only one layer; the durable control point is who may authorize, contest, and audit machine-mediated judgment.",
    "known_facts": [
      "Machine outputs increasingly mediate discovery and prioritization.",
      "Model confidence is not institutional authority."
    ],
    "unknowns": [
      "Which actor will own the durable appeal layer?",
      "What evidence will make machine consensus contestable in practice?"
    ],
    "changed_mind": "Repeated agent failures suggested that mandate duration and appeal rights matter as much as model quality.",
    "evidence_sought": [
      "Auditable failures",
      "Institutional deployments",
      "Revocation and appeal mechanisms"
    ],
    "strongest_counterargument": "Model providers may absorb the surrounding governance functions and make an independent layer unnecessary.",
    "falsifier": "Independent permission and provenance layers fail to improve outcomes or trust across repeated real deployments.",
    "public_artifacts": [
      "/research/briefings/what-is-w-axis",
      "/research/themes/control-layers"
    ],
    "human_contribution": "A documented case where a machine-mediated decision was corrected, appealed, or revoked.",
    "agent_query": "Return public artifacts and open counterarguments only.",
    "permission": "P0_PUBLIC",
    "provenance": "W-Axis public research synthesis",
    "last_updated": "2026-08-14",
    "review_date": "2026-11-14",
    "related_city": "Washington, DC",
    "human_trigger": "A source can provide a verifiable governance failure or live institutional test.",
    "related_questions": [
      "WQ-002"
    ]
  }
}