Case studies

What governed AI builds. What ungoverned AI costs.

Two ledgers. Nations that treated compute, data and governance as public goods — and organisations that let a model speak, decide or trade with no one accountable for it.

National implementationConsequences of ungoverned AIConversational AI validatedCity AI 360 · a test for cities
A

Implementing AI at national level

The published strategies behind these programmes — every objective, initiative and priority sector — are mapped in the national AI strategy library.

India · IndiaAI Mission2024 →

Compute and data as public goods.

Approved March 2024 with a ₹10,372 crore (~$1.25B) five-year outlay and run by a dedicated IndiaAI division under MeitY. Seven pillars — compute, applications, datasets, foundation models, skills, startup financing and responsible AI.

38k+
GPUs at ₹65/hr, ~⅓ of global cost
7,000+
datasets on AIKosh, 264 models, 20 sectors
22
languages in BharatGen, the sovereign LLM
Lesson. A single accountable unit, subsidised compute and a national dataset platform turned strategy into supply. Governance was a pillar from day one, not an afterthought.
Sources: PIB press releases 2025–26; IndiaAI / MeitYThe IndiaAI Mission: A policymaker’s approach to the convergence of AI and DPI
United Arab Emirates2017 →

Institutions first, then models.

The first country to appoint a Minister of State for AI (2017), followed by the National AI Strategy 2031, MBZUAI — the first graduate research university dedicated to AI (2019) — and TII's open-weight Falcon models (2023), placing a sovereign lab on the global leaderboard.

1st
Minister of State for AI worldwide
2031
strategy horizon; AI in every sector
Open
sovereign models released as open weights
Lesson. A visible institutional signal attracts talent and capital before the first model ships. Open weights buy auditability — and raise the bar for validation and weight security.
Sources: UAE Government portal; MBZUAI; Technology Innovation Institute
Singapore2019 →

Ship the governance tooling with the strategy.

National AI Strategy (2019) and NAIS 2.0 (2023) were paired with the Model AI Governance Framework and AI Verify (2022) — a testing toolkit organisations can run against their own systems, later extended to generative AI.

Lesson. A national testing framework is infrastructure. It gives regulators, buyers and vendors one language for "safe" — exactly the role a Trust Proof plays.
Sources: Smart Nation Singapore; IMDA / AI Verify Foundation
G7 · Hiroshima Process2023 →

Seven governments agreeing one vocabulary.

Under the 2023 Japanese presidency the G7 commissioned an OECD stock-take of generative AI across member states, then turned it into International Guiding Principles and a voluntary Code of Conduct for advanced AI developers — testing, incident reporting, provenance and security commitments that organisations sign up to directly.

7
member economies aligned on one set of principles
11
guiding principles for advanced AI developers
Voluntary
no enforcement — adoption has to be demonstrated
Lesson. Soft law moves faster than legislation and sets the vocabulary hard law inherits — but a voluntary commitment is worth only the evidence behind it. That evidence gap is exactly where an independent Trust Proof earns its place.
Sources: OECD, Towards a G7 common understanding on generative AI (2023); G7 Hiroshima Process International Code of Conduct
European Union · AI Act2024 →

Regulate by risk, enforce by evidence.

The first comprehensive AI law: prohibited practices, high-risk obligations (risk management, data governance, logging, human oversight, transparency) and penalties up to €35M or 7% of global turnover, phasing in through August 2026.

Lesson. Compliance is now a documentation and testing problem at scale — the market S.AI.F's compliance automation and audit services exist for.
Source: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689
B

When ungoverned AI caused loss

Each case names the control that was missing — and the S.AI.F pillar that supplies it. Figures are from tribunal rulings, court filings and company statements.

Air Canada · 2024Customer service

The chatbot invented a bereavement-fare policy. The tribunal made the airline own it.

Moffatt v. Air Canada (2024 BCCRT 149): the airline argued its chatbot was a "separate legal entity". The tribunal called that remarkable, found negligent misrepresentation and awarded C$812 — and a precedent that companies are liable for what their AI says.

Missing: grounded answers · human escalationS.AI.F 01 Validation
Legal profession · 2023 →Professional services

Fabricated citations, real sanctions.

Mata v. Avianca (2023) put six non-existent cases in a federal brief and cost the lawyers a $5,000 sanction; more than 1,300 similar incidents have since been tracked worldwide. In 2025 a Big Four firm refunded part of a government contract after AI-fabricated references appeared in a health-workforce report.

Missing: provenance · review gatesS.AI.F 01 · 02
Alphabet · 2023Markets

One wrong fact in a launch demo, ~$100B of market value in a session.

Bard's promotional example misattributed the first exoplanet images to the James Webb telescope. Investors read it as a reliability signal; Alphabet shares fell about 8% that day.

Missing: pre-release factual validationS.AI.F 01 Validation
Zillow · 2021Automated decisions

An unchecked pricing model bought thousands of homes at the wrong price.

Zillow Offers relied on algorithmic valuations to buy houses directly. When the model over-paid at scale, the company took a write-down of over $500M, shut the unit and cut about a quarter of its workforce.

Missing: drift monitoring · exposure limitsS.AI.F 01 · 02
Samsung · 2023Data security

Engineers pasted proprietary source code into a public chatbot.

Within weeks of allowing generative AI at work, confidential semiconductor code and meeting notes were submitted to an external model. Samsung banned the tools company-wide and began building an internal alternative.

Missing: usage policy · data-loss controlsS.AI.F 02 · 06 Security
Amazon · 2018Hiring

A recruiting model learned to penalise women — and was scrapped.

Trained on a decade of past hiring, the tool downgraded CVs containing the word "women's" and graduates of women's colleges. The project was abandoned after the bias could not be reliably removed.

Missing: bias testing · impact assessmentS.AI.F 02 Governance
Netherlands · 2021Public sector

A benefits risk-scoring algorithm brought down a government.

The childcare-benefits system flagged tens of thousands of families as fraudsters — disproportionately those with dual nationality — forcing repayments that ruined lives. The Dutch cabinet resigned in January 2021 over the scandal.

Missing: fairness audit · human oversight · redressS.AI.F 02 · 04
Australia · 2015–2023Public sector

"Robodebt": automated debt notices ruled unlawful, A$1.8B settlement.

Income averaging by an automated system raised hundreds of thousands of welfare debts without human review. Courts found the scheme unlawful; a 2023 Royal Commission called it a "crude and cruel mechanism".

Missing: legal validation · human-in-the-loopS.AI.F 02 · 04
Cursor · 2025Support automation

A support bot invented a policy; the market started insuring against it.

The bot told a developer that subscriptions were limited to one device — a rule that did not exist — and the "policy" spread across developer forums before the founders corrected it. A month later Lloyd's of London began underwriting losses from AI hallucinations.

Missing: policy grounding · disclosureS.AI.F 01 Validation
The pattern
Every loss traces to the same three gaps: no validation before release, no owner for the decision, no evidence trail after.
C

Conversational AI, validated

Three engagements on systems that talk to customers. Figures are illustrative of the method and thresholds we use, not of any named client.

Reference engagement · chatbotBaseline suite

The generic chatbot baseline.

A retrieval-backed assistant answering product, pricing and policy questions on a public website. No named client: this is the baseline battery every conversational system runs before anything sector-specific is added.

1,240
adversarial prompts across 11 OWASP LLM categories
4.1% → 0.4%
unsupported claims after grounding fixes
9 days
artefact submission to signed Trust Proof
What we tested
Grounding and citation fidelity against the source corpus; prompt injection and jailbreak resistance; PII leakage from context; refusal behaviour on out-of-scope questions; tone and language consistency; latency under burst load.
Finding. The assistant answered policy questions from model memory when retrieval returned nothing, producing confident statements with no source — the failure mode behind most publicised chatbot incidents.
Result. Retrieval-empty answers now refuse and hand off; every answer carries a citation the user can open. Unsupported-claim rate fell below the 1% declared threshold and is re-tested on every release.
Suites: grounding · red team · robustness · loadS.AI.F 01 Validation
Bank · call centreVoice + LLM

A call centre where the AI listened, summarised and advised.

An AI assistant transcribing live customer calls, summarising them into the CRM, suggesting next-best actions and drafting the post-call note. Agents kept the decision; the model shaped what they saw.

6,800
recorded calls replayed through the pipeline
3 dialects
Gulf, Levantine and MSA Arabic plus English
11.2%
summary error rate on code-switched calls
What we tested
Speech-to-text accuracy by dialect, accent and line quality; summary faithfulness against human-written notes; next-best-action fairness across customer segments; PII redaction before storage; escalation behaviour on distress and complaint language; agent override tracking.
Finding. Transcription degraded sharply on code-switched Arabic–English calls, and the summariser silently dropped customer objections — so the CRM record showed agreement where the customer had refused. Vulnerability cues in caller speech never triggered escalation.
Result. Dialect-specific acoustic tuning, a faithfulness check that flags dropped objections for agent confirmation, and a vulnerability-detection rule routed to a human queue. Summary error rate on code-switched calls fell to 2.8%; complaint-handling evidence now satisfies the conduct requirement.
Suites: accuracy by cohort · fairness · grounding · redactionS.AI.F 01 + 02
Telecom · WhatsApp AI chatAgentic · transacting

A WhatsApp agent that could change a customer’s plan.

A WhatsApp Business assistant handling balance queries, plan changes, roaming add-ons and payment links for millions of subscribers — an agent with write access to billing, reached over a channel the operator does not control.

2,600
injection and social-engineering attempts
7
unauthorised actions reachable before fixes
100%
transactions now carrying a signed action log
What we tested
Identity binding between WhatsApp number and account holder; prompt injection via forwarded messages, media captions and quoted replies; authorisation limits on billing actions; idempotency of payment links; PDPL consent and retention on message history; behaviour after SIM swap or number recycling.
Finding. A forwarded message containing crafted instructions could make the agent apply a roaming bundle to the sender’s account without a confirmation step, and number recycling let a new owner read the previous subscriber’s chat history.
Result. Untrusted content is now isolated from instruction context, every billing action requires an out-of-band confirmation and writes a signed action log, and number-change events force a history purge and re-verification. The operator cleared its TDRA and PDPL review with the evidence pack unchanged.
Suites: red team · authorisation · privacy · agentic guardrailsS.AI.F 01 + 02 + 03
What conversational systems have in common
The model is rarely the weak point. The channel, the retrieval gap and the write permission are.
D

City AI 360, a test for cities

The S.AI.F model applied to a whole city: every AI system the city operates on one registry, one control set and one public record. It runs first as a twelve-month test with a single city. The portfolio and targets are the programme's illustrative starting point, not a named city.

City AI 360 · pilot cityTest programme · 12 months

Every system a city runs, on one governed record.

A city registers each AI system it operates, classifies it by risk tier, takes it through seven gates from idea to retirement and publishes a plain-language register residents can appeal against. The test asks whether that record can be kept complete, current and independently signed off at city scale, starting from an illustrative portfolio of seven systems.

7
systems in the starting portfolio, L1 to L4
8
controls mapped to the EU AI Act and ISO 42001
3
phases: prepare, execute, sustain
What the test measures
Whether every high-risk system reaches production with its evidence complete; how long an incident takes from threshold breach to signed-off remediation; whether each resident-facing system is on the public register with an appeal route; and the portfolio trust index across nine dimensions.
Lesson. A city is assured system by system, not by decree. Value and delivery indicators say whether the programme is worth running; assurance and trust indicators say whether it is safe to keep running.
The starting portfolio
SystemRisk tierAssurance
Traffic incident predictionL3 · HighControlled
Citizen service assistantL1 · LimitedTrusted
Clinical demand forecastL3 · HighControlled
Energy load optimisationL3 · HighTrusted
Planning document reviewL2 · SignificantAttention
Benefits eligibility triageL3 · HighIntervention
Public space anomaly detectionL4 · RestrictedIntervention
Targets the test is judged on
≥15%
Service outcome uplift
40k
Officer hours redirected
≤6 mo
Idea to production
60%
Reuse across entities
100%
Evidence complete at L3+
≤10 d
Incident closure
≥85
Portfolio trust index
100%
Resident-facing published
Prepare · Execute · SustainS.AI.F 02 Governance · 04 Governments