I start to see a very specific kind of AI failure in government.
A new tool arrives, the institution responds with what it already knows how to do: mandatory training, warnings, guardrails, committees, sign-offs. None of that is wrong on its own, but the order matters.
When competence comes second, people never get good enough to discover value. When safety is experienced mainly as friction, workarounds become the real system. And if leadership treats AI as a document machine, it produces exactly what you ask of it, which is often more documents.
I tried to capture that pattern, and a few practical ways out of it.
Written by Tiago C. Peixoto. No agents involved – this predates the machinery. It first appeared on LinkedIn on December 19, 2025, and is reproduced here. Found an error? Tell me – corrections are logged.
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