Anti-Patterns

All courses / AI Governance / Module 5 / Chapter 20

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Recognise each anti-pattern from its symptom and name the chapter that holds its remedy.
• Explain why prohibition without a sanctioned alternative produces shadow AI and how the remedy reads it as a demand signal.
• Rewrite an unbounded agent configuration as a bounded permission manifest.
• Define fitness functions that detect anti-patterns from registers, telemetry and pipeline history.

Key concepts

Anti-pattern

Not a one-off mistake but a solution that looks reasonable, is adopted repeatedly and produces the same bad outcome every time. The chapter describes each through symptom and cause, consequence and remedy.

Pilot purgatory

Dozens of AI pilots over two or three years and none in production, because pilots are funded as experiments with no production budget, platform or owner. The remedy is to fund the platform as a product before funding the fifth pilot.

Compliance by checkbox

An AI Act readiness spreadsheet of articles with a status column in which no row links to a control, a test or an artefact. The remedy maps obligations to controls, controls to evidence and evidence to pipeline stages.

Unbounded agent

An agent whose prototype credentials were never narrowed and whose instructions serve as the security boundary. The remedy is bounded autonomy: a versioned permission manifest, a tool allow-list, per-action authorisation, approval gates for irreversible actions and spend limits enforced outside the model.

Mode error

A system in one usage mode governed as if it belonged to another, for example granting a tool that runs commands the trust appropriate to a chat assistant. Risk follows what the system can do, not how it was acquired.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. The centre of excellence that says no is accountable for risk but not for value. What would it be measured on if it were rebuilt as a platform team and an enabling team?
2. Hansa Mutual's first spreadsheet marked the logging obligation as compliant because logging was enabled. What would have to pass, and keep passing, for that claim to be true?
3. Nordvik Region's anti-patterns come from doing too little too slowly and Hansa Mutual's from doing much, quickly, in one shape for many jurisdictions. Which set is closer to your organisation, and which single anti-pattern would you address first?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. What was the only boundary on Hansa Mutual's prototype invoice-enquiry agent?

   1. A tool allow-list limited to reading invoice status
   2. A daily spending cap enforced by the gateway
   3. An approval gate for every credit note above a threshold
   4. A sentence in its instructions telling it never to issue credit notes
   Show the answer

   D. A sentence in its instructions telling it never to issue credit notes
   The prototype ran with a shared service account and every tool the finance API exposes; its only boundary was a sentence in the instructions, which a retrieved document can contradict. The production manifest removes the credit-note tool altogether.

2. How does the chapter advise responding to shadow AI?

   1. Discipline the staff concerned, to deter further unsanctioned use
   2. Make the sanctioned path faster than the shadow path, and onboard discovered use, not punish it
   3. Block all AI service domains at the proxy until the governance board has approved an acceptable-use policy
   4. Wait for the supplier to offer an enterprise tier at no extra cost
   Show the answer

   B. Make the sanctioned path faster than the shadow path, and onboard discovered use, not punish it
   Shadow AI arises where unsanctioned use was forbidden without a faster alternative. The remedy is an AI gateway with approved models and logging, the inventory, and telemetry that finds unregistered use. Shadow AI is a demand signal to be read.

3. According to the chapter, who should set the bar in an evaluation, as the governance remedy for evaluation by demo?

   1. The sponsor, who knows what the business needs from the system
   2. The model vendor, who knows the model's achievable scores
   3. Model risk or the system owner, approved at the assigned tier, never the sponsor
   4. The steering committee, by trying the system in a meeting and recording its impression in the minutes
   Show the answer

   C. Model risk or the system owner, approved at the assigned tier, never the sponsor
   The remedy is an evaluation pyramid with acceptance criteria as code and gates in the promotion pipeline. The governance point is who sets the bar: model risk or the system owner, approved at the tier Chapter 13 assigns.