{"id":7070859,"date":"2026-10-01T04:46:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T04:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7070859"},"modified":"2026-10-01T04:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T04:46:19","slug":"rogue-ai-agents-expose-a-controls-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7070859","title":{"rendered":"Rogue AI Agents Expose a Controls Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"


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<\/p>\n

\n

Every \u201crogue AI\u201d story has a common thread<\/h2>\n

Ellen Choi, founder of Edgefield Group<\/a>, built an AI chief of staff she calls TARS. <\/p>\n

It mistook a legitimate but unusual purchasing pattern for duplicate payments and recommended auto-refunding thousands of dollars in real revenue. The only reason it didn’t happen is that Choi never gave TARS the authority to execute refunds on its own.<\/p>\n

Byron Patrick, Senior Product Manager at Karbon<\/a>, asked his assistant to summarize his thinking after a customer call. Instead of a summary, it created a shared document and drafted a Slack message to his team. <\/p>\n

Nothing left the company this time. But nothing stopped it from trying.<\/p>\n

I’m not exempt from this, either. I set up Claude on my work account to draft emails and stage them for me instead of sending them. I never applied that same rule to my personal account. Last week I asked it for help with something, and it just sent an email as me. <\/p>\n

No draft. No review.<\/p>\n

There was nothing bad in it, thankfully. But it wasn’t really my voice, and I didn’t get a say.<\/p>\n

This is a controls problem<\/h2>\n

We talk about these incidents like they’re bugs in the model’s judgment. They’re not. <\/p>\n

Arthur didn’t hallucinate a fake invoice. It made a reasonable-sounding call with real access and no one checking its work before it acted. <\/p>\n

TARS pattern-matched on legitimate data and had the authority to act on a bad guess until a human thought to take that authority away.<\/p>\n

These stories have the same root cause: nobody separated “figure out what to do” from “actually do it.”<\/p>\n

We already solved this problem. Just not in accounting software.<\/h2>\n

Coding tools figured it out fast. Claude Code and similar tools default to an “ask, then build” pattern.<\/p>\n

The agent proposes the plan, you approve it, then it executes. <\/p>\n

After his Slack incident, Patrick\u2019s fix was to adopt a personal standing rule that the AI gives him a plan before it acts. That’s the same principle, applied by hand, because the tools don’t enforce it for him.<\/p>\n

Accounting software hasn’t caught up.<\/p>\n

I see plenty of “draft this” and “post this” prompts in the tools coming to market. I don\u2019t see the deliberate pause between them built into the product. <\/p>\n

It’s on the accountant to remember to ask for a plan first, just as it was on me to remember which of my own accounts had guardrails turned on.<\/p>\n

That’s backward. <\/p>\n

An intern doesn’t get to void an invoice or email a vendor without a second set of eyes, no matter how confident they sound.<\/p>\n

We don’t hold AI agents to that same basic discipline.<\/p>\n

Your control can\u2019t be hoping the agent behaves<\/h2>\n

When you evaluate AI tools for your firm or your finance team, the question isn’t “does it make good decisions?” <\/p>\n

Every agent looks great until the one time it doesn’t. <\/p>\n

The real question is, what happens between the decision and the action? Is there a checkpoint? Can a human see the plan before it executes? Can you revoke authority for one task without turning off the whole tool?<\/p>\n

If the answer is no, you have a liability waiting for its moment. It\u2019s like giving an intern the admin password and not reviewing their work.<\/p>\n

We’ve spent decades building segregation of duties into processes humans touch. AI agents don’t get a pass just because they’re software.<\/p>\n

If anything, they need more <\/strong>separation between judgment and execution, not less. Because it\u2019ll act on a bad guess with total confidence and zero hesitation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every \u201crogue AI\u201d story has a common thread Ellen Choi, founder of Edgefield Group, built an AI chief of staff she calls TARS. It mistook a legitimate but unusual purchasing pattern for duplicate payments and recommended auto-refunding thousands of dollars in real revenue. The only reason it didn’t happen is that Choi never gave TARS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7070860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11759],"tags":[11530,10194,30784,4106,36707],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7070859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accounting","tag-agents","tag-controls","tag-expose","tag-problem","tag-rogue"],"yoast_head":"\nRogue AI Agents Expose a Controls Problem - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7070859\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rogue AI Agents Expose a Controls Problem - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Every \u201crogue AI\u201d story has a common thread Ellen Choi, founder of Edgefield Group, built an AI chief of staff she calls TARS. 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